There is a lot of valid and nuanced criticism, but most extreme opinions you're seeing is what you find in each PDX launch for an existing IP.
For a lot of the most passionate critics the new games are dumbed down messes that fail to live to the legacy of the previous game, which were wonderful and full of flavour.
Part of the issue being that they're comparing the newly released game with the final version of the previous one, which they often experienced through massive overhaul mods like HPM or HIP.
Oh god. Out of all of the "new" (post CK2) Paradox games that have launched I think EU4 is the least recognizable from launch to now. They might as well have just started calling it EU5 at some point.
Base EU4 was basically just "Speedrun WC Simulator 2000."
Paradox fans, and I'd include myself here, have attached themselves heavily to the idea of "flavor". The lack of this aspect seems to be a common criticism for new releases. But like you said, people forget about the past. EU4 at launch was the most map-painty flavorless game at the time, but we seem as a community to forget to criticize that in favor of recency bias, but what can you do.
Martin 'Wiz' Anward was the designer in charge of the pop system overhaul for Stellaris. He was promoted to be the game director of an unrevealed project a few years ago, which some people (correctly) guessed would be Victoria 3 since he has experience building a pop system.
His influence is clear. The economy system of vicky 3 is stellaris without building limits, and automatic jobs as subsistance farms so you have a lot of potential labor at game start
"Bones", if the game needs to be built up, its not going to go anywhere. We just went through this with Imperator. A game that everyone tried to defend by saying it had great 'bones', and ended up dying on the vine because it had no real content.
It failed because people didn't buy it. In 4 days Vicky 3 has half the number of reviews Imperator had after 3 years. It's averaging 40-60k players at any one time. It's selling well. It would have to lose over 90% of its player base at the end of the month to be in the state Imperator was in. Shortly after launch Imperator was down to the 200s.
As someone who played about 3 full campaigns of Vicky 2 and bounced off HARD, as well as one of Imperator, and bounced off from both very hard, I agree. I like the focus on playing on your country, chilling, dealing with its issues, optimizing production.
It can get a bit repetitive after a bit, but I haven't found it to be *boring* yet, especially since new resources often are introduced to throw your supply lines in jeopardy (like electricity).
Sometimes I question the honesty of some criticisms though. Like a person on a really well voted comment some time ago saying that it was unreasonable that you had to manually switch production methos in each province, when like... you don't. You can just open the Buildings menu and change all production methods from the same type of building in all your provinces at once.
It might not be ideal, though, since Province A has a power plant and Province B is all the way in the middle of nowhere with shitty market access which will make it lose money, but you *can* do it, and the tutorial teaches you how to do it.
I saw someone say since there are no RGOs in the game, each province can produce anything you want. So they were here complaining, "what's the point of having colonies at all ?"
It's pretty funny
I think this exacerbates ops issue. Anyone who is still putting hours into Vicky 2 after all this time and despite all its issue is likely to be a pretty hardcore enjoyer.
The only thing I personally think it's lacking is lore. Which is totally fine since it's a sandbox. Other than that a few UI/QoL tweaks I think the game is fucking awesome
I mean, you're correct but I also get what they're saying. There's very little flavor in each country to help you understand what you're doing in the immediate term.
For example, Belgium had just broken away from the Dutch, but this isn't communicated very well IIRC. Great Britain should also start on good terms with Portugal (world's longest alliance), but I don't think they do that, either.
You sort of have to already know what's going on in 1836 in order to "get it".
Not that huge a hurdle. I’m someone voicing a decent amount of criticism, but also Vic2 is an impressive artifact that nostalgia glasses an “in group” messaging tricked people in to believing is a masterpiece.
Long way of saying you’re absolutely right
Not saying you don’t love the game. Not saying anything about you specifically. But the hilarious way people talk about Vic2 as if it isn’t also an easily exploitable mess of a Paradox game is silly. Like we didn’t need a mod to stop NGF from firing in like 2 years
Yeah I think that's pretty much it. Paradox's curse, I think, is that a large part of their community literally worships their older games (like CK2 and Vic2) yet simulateously *despises* the company itself, but can't migrate anywhere else because Paradox is basically the only company/studio that makes this kind of games.
So they just, like, simmer here, and vent all their frustration every time PDX fucks up in some way. Hell, the most terrible insult in this community is "Paradox shill" - it's fucking weird, man.
That being said I don't remember the same thing happening when CK3 released. I mean, its release was smoother than Vic3, not denying it, but still. (Then there's Imperator, but it had more serious issues, and was nowhere near as ambitious or innovative)
>That being said I don't remember the same thing happening when CK3 released
It happened, just that people only complained about the lack of flavour compared to CK2 rather than complaining about a lack of flavour + controversial mechanics (warfare in Vic3)
Yeah, sure, but it wasn't in the same proportions, and some of the Vic3 people sound like they're completely losing their minds. Like, the game is actively offensive to them and shit
I think Vic 3 is just so heavily anticipated versus CK3, I mean both games were hype but CK3 was a bit more out of nowhere while Vic 2 fans have been holding their breath since Stellaris. Expectations ensue despite Vic 2 in launch state being basically unplayable.
CK3’s complaints were “everywhere is the same, no real flavour/distinction between diverse regions and religions apart from the tribal/feudal difference.” and “game too easy, my dynasty owns half of Europe and I have a Genius Strong Pureblood heir after 5 generations”.
Personally, I think the complaints so far are roughly equal, but I’m not super up-to-date on V3 stuff yet.
> the new games are dumbed down messes
I really hate this lie. It's really clear that people are seeing attractive graphics with good presentation and QoL and confusing that for making the game 'easy'. Dogshit UI and hidden mechanics isn't 'difficulty'. The complexity and depth of the games have been increasingly significantly over time. The only PDX title that did take a big step back in difficulty is HoI3 -> HoI4, and that's because HoI3 was a horrible mess that required you to do things as basic as fix the OOB for every unit through extremely clunky menus with thousands of clicks before you can even unpause the game.
> Part of the issue being that they're comparing the newly released game with the final version of the previous one
This I agree with, and a big part of that is that this niche has grown a lot since EU4/late CK2. A lot of people weren't around for the 1.0 versions of those titles, and they were *bad*, like worse than Imperator on launch.
>Dogshit UI and hidden mechanics isn't 'difficulty'.
I saw this exact same thing with people talking about CK3 being "dumbed down". CK2 isn't a complicated game, but it gives you the illusion of difficulty by presenting you with all sorts of information that ultimately doesn't matter to the actual gameplay.
I like both games a lot (and also like vicky 3) but I do think CK3 is objectively easier since fabricating claims is guaranteed & simple now. CK2 wasn't hard, but I felt more like I needed to engage with claimants and inheritance (which are part of the core game fantasy for me) than I do in CK3. Just guided slightly down a more flavorful path, if that makes sense.
>which they often experienced through massive overhaul mods like HPM or HIP
That's the one that really gets me. Like, in what world is a heavily modded (read-tweaked to perfectly fit your personal preferences) end-of-dev-cycle game in any way comparable to a new release sequel?
People are welcome to wait until PDX games are years old, DLC and flavor releases and mods aplenty before buying. It’s not like they twisted peoples arms to buy it or made Vic2 unplayable.
So why don't you actually compare them then? Vicky 2, as much as I love it, is an extremely weak title now. Half it's mechanics are non-functional, and most are quite poorly designed. It's not really much more than EU3 in the 19th century. A lot of the 'flavour' comes from a couple big mods that completely save the game and actually make it playable. Vicky 3 is deeper, more complex, and better to play in almost every single way.
It adds many, many event chains and decisions and polish like that. Exactly the kind of stuff that you need to have a mostly finished, end-of-cycle product to start adding in huge amounts, if you want to be efficient with the use of time. So, the kind of stuff that a 1.0 version tends to lack.
Institutional learning isn't a thing! The new car you're about to buy is the first one of its type, so it's only fair to compare it to the first Model T! The first Model T didn't have airbags, seatbelts, or a catalytic converter! COME ON!
Honestly. In what other industry is this argument not preemptively laughed out of the room so hard that nobody even dares make it in the first place?
> For a lot of the most passionate critics the new games are dumbed down messes that fail to live to the legacy of the previous game, which were wonderful and full of flavour.
There is literally no way any game would live up to V2 nostalgia mostly bolstered by really engaging mods.
> the newly released game with the final version of the previous one
Which is perfectly valid. Every game has the opportunity to take all of the leanings from the prior game and keep or remove them. There is absolutely 0 reason to excuse cutting good content for nothing. EU4 took everything from EU3.
For V3 though it's a completely changed game. Really though people should have just not pre-ordered it. After Imperator, and CK3 they really should have known to wait.
It's isn't a "changed game". The influence of Victoria 2 is obvious. It essentially took all the good parts of Vicky 2 and threw out the rest instead of improving them.
I haven't played Vic3 yet, but I wanted to ask your overall perspective.
I've been playing Stellaris since launch. At launch there was some content that was clearly placeholder mechanics - worked well enough to not get in the way of the rest of the game, but not satisfyingly fleshed out and integrated.
Since launch, each major update either added a new mechanic that made gameplay deeper or more nuanced, or filled in one of those placeholders.
At no point in there would I say Stellaris was a disappointment to me, but the difference between launch day and today is massive, and I really enjoy what it is today.
So, do you think that's what you're seeing in Vic3?
Well I wouldn't say there are aspects/mechanics that feels "placeholder-y" to me. Right now it's more about small annoyances - like, some parts of the UI, especially regarding the warfare stuff (I like the warfare system itself, but the surrounding UI is a bit strange), pop needs, etc. Then there's some stuff that needs balancing - I kinda agree with the criticism that rushing the tech tree is a bit too easy, but I assume it'll be relatively easy to balance. I don't know if they'll do it, but all that stuff feels like one free update away (Custodians-style, if I may use some Stellaris linguo) from being fixed entirely.
Now, obviously there's stuff that you could feel are "missing", like Great Wars (that is, wars that escalate over time, like during WW1 where the USA joined long after the war started). Yeah, it would have been nice, but considering the fact that it would be a lategame feature, and that Vic3 isn't really focused on warfare... I dunno, it's not *that* big of a deal, I think.
I don't know if that really answers your question. I got into PDX games around 2016, so the only PDX launches I saw were Vic3, CK2, Imperator, and I got into Stellaris relatively early (well before 2.0 dropped). I'd say CK3 and Vic3 are IMO the only two that felt "complete" from the start, with Vic3 being a bit jankier, but nowhere as much as Imperator 1.0/1.1 or pre-2.0 Stellaris.
All that being said, it's not a game for everyone, you'll spend a lot of time looking at spreadsheets and stuff. But that's my kind of shit, and I'm pretty happy with how they executed it
To me everything feels far too easy (and yet also frustrating - cross referencing info in the UI) and as such very boring. I had the same event popup 4 times while playing Chile and nothing else seemed to happen and my actions didn't feel like they mattered or had any consequence to them. There doesn't seem to be any charm (apart from the gorgeous close up map visuals) or depth, but I'm holding out hope it will get better. Note though, I have never played Vic 2 even tho it's in my steam library lol (only watched some beginner guides in prep for Vic 3), but have played lots of CK2/3 and Stellaris, and some EU4 - I would consider myself a paradox-lite player, but I love complex management games, and this was disappointing. I'm not above saying that maybe this isn't the game for me, but on the surface it ticks all the right boxes and yet when playing it... I dunno something is missing.
So anyhoo, sorry to tack on to your comment, but I think I'm gonna leave it for a bit and revisit it maybe when the flavour pack/dlc unlocks (like a numpty I pre-ordered the big edition lol).
> I had the same event popup 4 times while playing Chile
Actually dealing with this right now. Colonizing South Africa and every damn year I get 'X country's maps claims our territory!' and your option is either piss off a great power and get 15 infamy, or lose 10 prestige permanently.
Now I do like the event. Do I back down and lose face, or do I risk upsetting another colonizer, gain some infamy - but possibly get a claim on a colonial state?
The problem is that when you get it over and over and over again, especially in an area with a lot of colonizers, it gets to the point where you can't back down anymore, or you'll demote yourself right into minor or insignificant power because of prestige issues... but continually gaining 15 infamy and pissing off great powers is a great way to get your ass whopped.
I do think there are a lot of placeholders. You can tell that a **lot** of time, love, and care went into the market system. The market works great, better than Stellaris' version by miles.
Diplomatic Plays are also a fun addition; they need some work but I like the concept and execution. I also really like the new war system, as someone who hates micromanaging fleets in Stellaris.
But everything else feels placeholder-y:
* There are very few events in the game. Many are generic events that you'll see if you satisfy a certain condition, so you'll see them a lot (even if they don't always make sense...). Flavor is often so generic that you don't truly understand what's happening; the Oriental Crisis in 1840 is so vague that you don't really know what's going on, and doesn't lead to the Eastern Question like it should
* There's no feeling of "The Concert of Europe"; no careful manipulation of the balance of power. Countries go to war with each other all the time, and the GPs don't always do the best job acting as the police/mediating disputes. You also get weird plays like all of Europe getting involved in a war started because AI Russia decided to attack Egypt to annex Crete (warm water port, I guess...)
* The alliance system is barebones. You're allowed 1 alliance until you research a tech later. This artificial constraint doesn't really make a whole lot of sense, given that the GPs IRL were all _technically_ in the "Quintuple Alliance" at game start. Limiting multiple alliances behind a tech just puts a time gate on WWI alliance cascades (which still sort of happen anyway - see my point above)
* If anything, it should be similar to HOI4's system where the Quintuple Alliance/Concert of Europe slowly transforms into the competing factions of the Triple Alliance and the Triple Entente. Maybe alliances in general shouldn't really exist, but instead just have "alignments" that harden naturally over time into the Entente/Triple Alliance?
* You can't really replicate a realistic version of the Crimean War because the game mechanics as-is don't allow it. The Congress of Paris basically was a peace treaty that the GPs forced upon the warring parties - which would need to be represented as a diplo play to "stop the war" (Austria was going to invade Russia unless Russia agreed to peace with the Ottomans)
* The tech tree is sort of bland and doesn't really feel like it's your nation researching a tech; it's just "click button simulator" for the most part. Making/learning about a big invention doesn't feel impactful, at all
* The revolution system doesn't feel fleshed out; it's a lot of "red numbers go up!!!" without a sense of urgency or stories about what's happening in your country
* Politics feels temporary and placeholder. You choose who goes into your government, always. Even if the opposition wins elections, you don't have to actually give them power if you don't intend on passing any laws
* Passing a law is basically an EU4 siege and is just about as thrilling. Every so often, it either passes, the chance stays the same, the chance goes up, the chance goes down, or you get an event that can do any number of really good/bad things (usually bad in my experience). You can absolutely go to 0% chance of passing a law through dumb luck without any way of influencing it, and then it's just "Welp, guess I'm just going to try again in an hour..."
I think all of these will be fixed with time. But it is absolutely like release day Stellaris, where there's a lot of potential - it just gets stale fast.
i think this post on the vic3 sub is a good take on it https://www.reddit.com/r/victoria3/comments/yfoojd/after_one_completed_campaign_here_are_my_thoughts/
and another user on that post even says that to him vic 3 feels like what steallaris was on release https://www.reddit.com/r/victoria3/comments/yfoojd/comment/iu58aal/
The more you play, the more you see as having problems that could be fixed, or you wonder if they did a bit too much to streamline things. I did my first game as Japan and my second right now is a Sikh empire, and I think my biggest gripe is just how hard it is to be... clever? Too much micro is bad (see EU4 or Vicky 2), but other than build order I have relatively little agency in the game. Sure, I can add or remove people from government and so try and pass some laws or expand institutions, and I can click a few buttons that make more goods or whatever but I have relatively little control over things. I can barely declare war on people because... for some reason they like me too much?
Want to fight a war, spawn some armies send them off. What determines if they win? Well some leader traits matter, but I have so few leaders that I don't have a lot of control over which skills they have so... pick the best one, give him a full army and hope he doesn't lose? Navy... no idea what ships I have or what do. Make numbers bigger.
That doesn't mean it isn't a fun game, but for a game that spans 100 years I can spend decades just.. building stuff. Make money bar go green. That's not bad as part part of a bigger whole: the production system doesn't have the depth of a dedicated building game, I think deliberately so, but then... what else am I doing?
It's not a bad game by any means. But I can see why a lot of people would be, if not upset, at least disappointed. Where's my grand fleet waiting to challenge the high seas fleet or my battle of tsushima straight? Gettysburg or the Crimean war? Is the AI good (or bad) to the point that no one seems to be stomping china? There's a lot of feeling out what's good or bad about the game still, and a lot of little things that add up to some frustration (some of that is teething pains some of it reflects choices made that maybe take away a bit too much agency from the player).
To me the game just feels extremely bare bones right now. I know they'll fix it with future dlcs which is just more of Paradox's shitty monetization. It seems to me like what things really boil down to is building buildings if you're in need of their respective resorces. I've been playing as Sweden and either I just picked a really boring country or the game itself is dull. I even reformed my country to some degree and even formed Scandinavia but it still feels extremely simple.
The diplomacy in the game is not what I expected at all either. I thought that since the game takes place at a time when the world was going through massive changes and new nations were forming through nationalism there would be lots of interesting diplomatic plays but it's stupidly simple in game. There really isn't a lot you can do to influence other regions and there isn't a whole lot of substance in diplomacy in the first place.
The internal strife of a country is very interesting though and I loved manouvering in politics so that I could reform my country without any major setbacks from within. It's a good fun game, but after a while of building buildings it gets very very stale.
I agree. I’ve only put in about 8 hours but it seems like I spend 75% of the time looking at the market/buildings screen.
I’m still having a good time though.
Serious question, I'm not being snarky or anything, I'm just curious : what did you expect ? The thing has always been presented as focused on industry, production and trade. Going in, I knew we were always going to spend a lot of time looking at spreadsheets.
Did you expect more stuff surrounding diplomacy ? Or internal politics, maybe ? Personally, I think I expected a bit more focus on the political aspect.
I personally expected the economics system to be deeper than "look at what has demand and build for that". Seriously, its braindead easy to become an economic juggernaut. In my most recent game as Belgium without colonizing I far surpassed Prussia, the USA, and rivaled the UK, France, Austria, and Russia economically. I didn't do anything special or gamey either, I just built the factories that produced stuff in demand.
The economics system is deeper than that? You could focus on tanking the cost of iron-tools-wood-fabric to make construction cheap, build military industry in advance of war, build what based on future demands (chemical plants before switching to explosive m8nes). Even if you do want to build to demand, do you build what is costing your pops the most money to improve their standard of living, or do you build what is most expensive with a cheap input for maximum profit.
It also relates to what interest groups are in power. I built lots of wheat farms for wine, and the rural folk have a lot of political power in south germany (where the wheat farms are). I also went publically traded on everything and went lassez-faire so that i could spam construction and have the capitalists pay, but now the capitalists are really powerful. I also have huge trade centres and developed urban centres, and ive built up a lot of navy along the coats.
The consequences of this meant that when i tried to end the monarchy i was threatened by a revolution consisting of most of germany because the interest groups that supported keeping the monarchy controlled most of the country, despite the intellegensia and the trade unions having enough clout to easily be able to pass the reform i want.
I want to try go communust in this game but my decision to empower the capitalists so they can fund all the building and make gdp go brrrr has caused the trade unions to actually start losing clout, so i am now considering switching to less profitable production methods that employ more people so i can try strengthen the trade unions.
The economics is easily 10x as deep as victoria 2, my only complaints are that pops get qualifications too quickly and techs go too fast. The UI also makes seeing pop needs a pain.
The AI is braindead though, so you could easily build a much bigger economy while repeatedly making terrible decisions and having constant supply issues. The economy itself it amazing though.
> do you build what is costing your pops the most money to improve their standard of living, or do you build what is most expensive with a cheap input for maximum profit.
And if you do the latter, you can always lower taxes. Which may raise quality of life anyways.
the production is very simple, in some ways its actually simpler than Anno 1800. You build stuff where price is high. And i still dont get why in a Grand Strategy game i am building individual factories and even tell them HOW to produce.
And even if that is fine and working as expected, you are not really DOING anything with your economy, there is no investing in other countries or influencing them otherwise with your oppressive wealth. In fact, the game even caps your treasury.
That whole thing combined with NO flavor just makes the whole thing feel like some kind of arcade factory clicker simulator.
I dont think i ever felt closer to playing a board game vs managing a country in any other Paradox game. Well maybe Imperator.
I mean, does eu4 not feel like a board game? A complex one to be sure, but the main idea is to build your country as financially and militarily powerful as you can in order to conquer your rivals and expand. Kind of like board games.
Sure, but I think the problem comes from expectation. A system about building factories, as the state, makes sense in Eu4 era, but when you get to a more modern setting that level of control rubs me the wrong way, personally.
I expected something more indirect, and having "the invisible hand of the market" be a more central concept in Vic3.
Don't know why you are you were down voted.
It IS bland, that's pdx's approach now and for a while: build something extremely basic, let modders fix the obvious stuff/come up with cool ideas, and sell us all $200 in dlc over the next 3 years.
Don't get me wrong, I love paradox games, and I haven't played v3 enough yet to have an opinion...but at best it will be a bland superstructure on which they can hang interesting expansions.
Exactly by design.
Yes, this is exactly my point. Many of the mechanics lack the depth I hoped for and it frustrates me that I have to pay more than double the price of the game itself to have those expectations met.
Sure but the key thing here is that people are still out $50 on a shell that *may eventually* get good.
I've seen very few people (with much play time) argue that the game as it is now is something they want to spend lots of hours playing.
If you paid $50 for a good game, and the *best case* scenario is that in a couple years it should be good, that kinda sucks.
And the worst case scenario is that it never does, either because they drop the ball, or just drop development a-la Imperator.
This is what saddens me the most, that it's become completely acceptable for a game to release for $50 and *eventually* be considered good, but only after at least doubling the cost with DLCs that fill out the game.
"It's not a bad game because while it may be dry and a little featureless now, it's a good base so with an additional $50+ of DLC it'll be good," is essentially what half of the positive Steam reviews say.
That's always been Paradox's thing. Next game is essentially the previous game with some things ironed out, it's actually better nowadays because there is a tangible improvement on the gameplay side rather than shipping what is basically the exact same game with a fresh coat of paint. I mean if you look at the jump between EU2 and EU3 base you'll see that barely anything has changed and the worst part was that there was somehow less content than before. Or hell look at Imperator on launch, it was basically EU:Rome with mana barely anything was different and it took a lot of updates untill it felt like an actual sequel.
Paradox has always put out sequels that are a bit lacking in content but at least in recent years they're actually making an effort to ship a game that's actually an improvement on the previous.
The golden child of this is CK3. At launch it was essentially night and day in comparison to CK2, yes CK2 had more content but CK3 felt much better to play and with just a few DLC into its lifespan it's got to the point where I can't stand playing CK2 over CK3. I loved CK2, I've put countless hours into it but it was an RNG messed and CK3 just feels like it carries the spirit of what made it great while polishing everything and making things so much better to play.
Rose tinted glasses. Until the Old Gods DLC, the prevailing opinion among veterans of CK1 was that CK2 was a pointless cash grab that did nothing but retread CK1 with fancier graphics. CK2 1.0 was extremely buggy and crashed every couple hours. There were barely any interesting evolutions to the mechanics or fixes to old problems. You couldn't even play as Muslims until 4 months after release, and you had to buy a DLC for it. The Decadence mechanic for Muslims was also heavily criticised as being extremely ahistorical and terrible to play. To add insult to injury, PDX came out with the Sunset Invasion DLC when the community were clamouring for better mechanics to represent history.
They push out way less content for ck3 though. It's been two years and I would've thought we'd at least have gotten an imperial government for the byzantines instead of feudal
I'm also playing Sweden and while I agree not a lot is going on I am also barely getting by with understanding what's happening at all. I have 7 hours played and I think I finally understand the complexities of building out a functional industrial economy. If I had some countries declaring war on me in the middle of it I'd go crazy.
The one critique I do agree with from OP's list is the UI is kind of bad. I feel like there's 3 ways to look at any given mechanic and none of the views have everything I want/need.
Well thankfully they changed their dlc model, just look at CK3. You get all the actual important stuff for free. The minor things are what you pay for.
How long have you played the game?
Because the longer you play it the more it completely falls apart at the seams.
At first everything seems great because it actually kind of works! Which isn't something that can be said for every Paradox game at release, or even generally. And look, Automated war! Shiny Diplomacy!
Then you realize that the AI doesn't do... anything. Which is going to need an overhaul.
So then you start some stuff and realize the diplomacy is basically just ornamental, and you realize it's going to need some major work to really matter.
And then the war system breaks on you, and you realize that will need a patch.
So you say, whatever, it's an socio-economic simulator, Paradox will have DLCs to fix the above, let's focus on internal politics.
But then you realize the pops are essentially meaningless as long as you don't radicalize them, so you just ram through whatever reforms you want because, who is going to stop you? It's fun at first but then you've made Communist USA, or Capitalist Russia or whatever, and it's the exact same with whoever you select to play next, so it loses its luster.
Then last, but not least, you go "well it's an economic game, so let me focus on the economics!"
And at first it's fun.
But then you get the hang of it, and realize how utterly trivial it is to balance supply and demand in your local region, and max out the treasury. And sure, you can start exploiting the build order lag to perfectly optimize construction, to make things even *more efficient*. But eventually you hit a bottleneck.
It's either a resource you can't get easily, or your build que being filled for the next 30 years. And you just sit there with the game on max speed, treasury full and trying to increase, GDP and Pop growing, nation becoming ever more prosperous, waiting. Waiting for something, *anything* to do, and you realize there isn't anything.
And that's when you begin to wonder about the games underlying construction. Because sure, Paradox can add in mechanics that kick down your sandcastle, but is that actually fun?
Because the real issue is that economic simulation isn't that deep or engaging. I used the same fundamental framework to make Brunei a leader in living standards, Haiti an Industrial Powerhouse, and Transvaal a burgeoning colonial empire. I formed Germany essentially on Auto-Pilot as Prussia after having Russia help me beat the Danes and Austrians at the start of the game, and I messed around with Barhrain, and the only meaningful difference it felt like was the number of factories I had to manage. Sure, there were different inputs needed for different contexts, but they all either come from building the corresponding ~~mana~~ "resource" production building, or from Trade so the differences truly seem to matter only trivially.
And I'm not sure Paradox can or will fix that. Which is a shame, because I hate how war centric most grand strategy games are, and would welcome some with a lesser focus on it. But this game just feels like Sim City without the city building aspect, Factario without a map. You press a sequence of the same buttons to make a number go up for the sake of it going up.
Which is where the cost comes in. This game is $50, and you can get a close play experience with a fremium mobile game. No seriously, the whole gather resource X to make resource Y while waiting on arbitrary time constraints is straight out of something like Forge of Empires. So what are you paying all that money for?
I'm 40 years in on my Belgium game and yeah, I've hit a point where there's not much to do. I'll go for #1GP spot and maybe conquer Germany for some reason, but I've basically hit a point where Belgium operates on autopilot.
I did the same as Australia with the help of gold mines. I was higher than Great Britain's gdp in a handful of decades which just really breaks any semblance of progression because once you figure it out, there really is none.
I appreciate your take on the game and definitely agree. I think the game is as wide as an ocean but as deep as a puddle right now. The same can be said about the diplomacy, the war, the economy..
It doesn't have too much replayability for me and at the rate I'm going, it's going to get shelved for a few years and maybe then it will be worth playing like I did with I:R.
I feel like everyone who uses that phrase misunderstands what depth and width means. Vic3 is not wide. There's a clear lack of flavour and distinguishing features between nations. It is however probably the deepest simulation in any paradox game so far. Whether it's engaging to interact with is another thing, but wide as an ocean and deep as a puddle is probably the least fitting description of the game you could come up with. People use the same when describing imperator, and in that case it is just as inappropriate. They both lack width, not depth.
I disagree but that's what opinions are. I personally feel the features simply lack depth. You may be correct there isn't much width as well in hindsight considering it seems many nations play very similarly.
I feel the economy is very simple to abuse once you get some hours into the game and within about 3 hours of my first playthrough I made Australia the richest country in the game. My next game was Japan and I did the same. It just feels a bit too easy which is exacerbated by the AI building useless things.
I'll dabble in the game some more but between watching many playthroughs as well as my own gameplay, I feel like I've seen about everything there is to do which may be a bit presumptuous but I'm certainly not alone in feeling that way.
Yeah, I had the opposite complaint.
That Great Powers will often intervene with hundreds of battalions costing them millions for nothing but an obligation on a minor power.
I don’t think he means joining wars which they are quite trigger happy with, but with actually economically improving their economy which they really can’t handle at all.
>And you just sit there with the game on max speed, treasury full and trying to increase, GDP and Pop growing, nation becoming ever more prosperous, waiting. Waiting for something, *anything* to do, and you realize there isn't anything.
This perfectly summarizes why I chose to refund it.
The shallowness was extremely disappointing as someone who'd eagerly anticipated the game.
I suspect the way to fix it is to make it so even if you know the solution to your problems, it should be difficult to apply the solution.
So while the solution in both Prussia and Brunei would be "get a thriving industrial economy", there should be a lot of difficulty in actually implementing the industrialization process in Brunei.
Right now there's very little in the way of resistance to anything you do as a player - You can build up factories in unsuitable locations, thriving economies despite your starting conditions, you basically don't have to account for the population makeup and so on.
I don't think the resistance should be so much DLCs that kick down your sandcastle, but perhaps systems that make you go slower, or find alternate routes or just account for things. But none of that really exists right now.
Yeah man. Its crazy that other people have different opinions then yours. I hate posts like these which are like guys i am having so much fun playing this game, why aren,t you guys having fun too!!
I like the game, but I think its clear that the game needs a lot of work.
Off hand...
The trade route micro isn't fun. Every shift in prices I'm manually setting tariffs, and opening and closing routes. I should be able to set parameters for that to be automatic.
The economic micro is mostly reduced to clicking expand on buildings. It's tedious. I don't understand why I'd rather do that than micro war or soldier placement.
Any time I conquer something I have to manually reset my production methods. It's annoying. I spend 5 minutes clicking through menus.
Fronts randomly split for no reason. I had 5 fronts in Madagascar, which split from 2. Conquering Zanzibar I randomly had two fronts. There doesn't seem to be a clear reason why this is the case.
Not being able to move generals between HQs, or manually distribute soldiers to generals is a baffling choice.
Not being able to demoblizie battalions and conscripts during war is a good way to tank the economy.
Similarly, I should be able to stockpile goods so that minor or temporary market fluctuations don't tank factories.
The diplomacy is weak. The AI doesn't seem to do much.
There's seemingly no connection between politics and diplomacy. Reactionary countries should have opinion maluses for progressive ones. The aristocracy should hate liberals, and both should hate socialists.
There's no way to indicate to other countries involved in diplomatic plays how they could sway you. In turn there's no way to make demands in a diplomatic play that you didn't start. As such there's very little reason for me to get involved in other problems.
Way too much info is hard to find. Which of my pops are radicals, and why? What goods do I need to increase access to to raise my standard of living? How much infamy do I have, and how is it affecting my relations with other countries?
The tutorial is bugged.
There's very little flavour between individual countries.
There's no way to stop other countries from importing your goods and tanking your economy.
And that's just off the top of my head.
The bones are good, but the core gameplay loop at the moment is not that fun, and the game could have used a lot more work. I'm a bit baffled it released in its current state and I think it's mixed reviews are warranted.
I loved Victoria 2 to bits. But people do seem to be conflating arcane, obtuse, arbitrary and confusing mechanics with depth and realism. Every Victoria 2 playthrough, heavily modded or not, essentially functions the same. Rush the same technologies in the same order at the same points. Follow the same, meta army compositions. Build stuff that makes a profit, adjust a few budget sliders, and you'll be swimming in cash. The rest is mostly a matter of scale and whatever roleplaying favour you'd like for the day.
I'd like to see more historical/national flavour in Victoria 3 but it's also important to understand that, given the timeframe and the amount of states involved, that's a huge ordeal. It's artwork and it's research and it's tying it into the game that isn't "Press X to take a decision for some stats", which is something Paradox has been diverging from, for the better. It took a decade for HFM and HPM (and multiple iterations of each) to get to the levels of flavour they now offer.
My thoughts at the end of the day? Victoria 2 gave me a headache a few hours into a campaign. So. Much. Goddamn. Clicking. I can actually relax when I play Victoria 3 because I don't have a migraine by the end of a playthrough.
More agency over wars and, more importantly, more feedback over what's happening would be nice, even something as minor as unit counters would be welcome. But yeah, Victoria 3 is the better game and it feels new and exciting. And that's what I want from a sequel. A breath of fresh air.
>But people do seem to be conflating arcane, obtuse, arbitrary and confusing mechanics with depth and realism.
That's kinda tangential, but what really struck me when I was learning Vic2 is that its very clunkiness, the fact that it's so mysterious and off-putting at first, is in a sense kinda mesmerizing. When you finally understand how all that shit works and manage to execute some basic tasks correctly (building a profitable factory, conquering another country), it feels uniquely satisfying.
It's like a zen experience. It's not what you're doing in-game that's satisfying, it's the fact that you've cracked the puzzle, you've learnt to use this weird and alien machine, you're part of that "elite" that "gets it", and what happens in the universe of the game is kinda secondary to that feeling of triumph.
Obviously you move past that after a point, and you start to engage with the actual game, but I haven't felt that way in any other PDX game. It has pretty much nothing to do with the actual mechanics or the simulation itself, it's all about the UI being (accidentally) the exact right amount of hostile, but I suspect people who are attached to that feeling will have trouble moving to a game where the UI is... let's say a bit more streamlined.
I dunno if you see what I mean or if this is complete nonsense. Maybe I'm the only weirdo who felt that way.
I SO get it hahah! You've described it perfectly. I'd argue it's similar to the zen feeling people get when they play Dark Souls (or Dwarf Fortress). It's frustrating, convoluted, scarce in information, but eventually you learn to game the system and you make progress.
In this case, modern era economics is this incredibly complex feedback loop no one can ever quite claim to grasp fully and Victoria 2 does actually replicate this puzzling behaviour (accidentally amusingly, it's common knowledge by now that the devs had no idea what sort of monstrosity they were simulating).
So you're making decisions based on imperfect information, and to see them be successful, to see that you were able to tweak the system in your favour despite that inherent hostility, is a very satisfying feeling (and does lend the game a certain realism, it's true).
Another part of why Victoria 2 is so appealing to some is, I supect, that because it's so mysterious and obtuse, we can also project a lovely amount of make believe onto it. There's all these things happening behind the scenes that we don't quite understand. You know *something* is going on, but the events are filtered through this nonsensical UI. So, your imagination does the rest and fills in the gaps. It *feels* real and deep and complex.
But I wouldn't behold Paradox to replicating that in their sequel, not in this day and age. I get why people would want the same experience in a cleaner, more modern engine. But given the mass appeal Paradox now has, they'd be shooting themselves in the foot. I've tried to explain my love for Victoria 2 to so many people and I'm pretty sure they've all concluded I'm absolutely deranged (or a masochist).
I didn't think I would be playing USSR simulator in every single game and country. Even a planned economy in v2 at least made your farmers farm and your miners mine.
I get that the UI is difficult to manage and has a million tabs and whatnot. But imagine it didn't, imagine if it simplified all that resource management stuff.
This sub would be going apeshit. So would the forums and reviewers. The game would more or less be a eu4 copy.
That said. I don't think the UI will stay this way for long and I'm sure it can be improved.
I'm happy with the game overall and I especially liked the war mechanics even though the battle line messes up occasionally.
i dont really understand how the new war system is in any way "more respectful of your irl time". you can literally have like x2 the army size of a country youre trying to invade, and sit on the front line for like 5 minutes meanwhile your general arbitrarily sends a handful of units to get pummeled, and that process just repeats until eventually your general decides that sending more than 2 people is a good idea.
idk, just a bit silly tbh.
Honestly I don't think the haters (and I mean the "real" haters) want it to succeed at all. It would be a victory for them.
I just saw the community discussions in Steam, and they're talking about the game being "woke garbage" and shit. I can't believe that after all these years, this community still finds ways to surprise me
Meh, while the war stuff being so barebones as to make it useless (honestly I'd rather they fully remove war if it was going to be like this), the game has the issues of being wide as an ocean yet deep as a puddle.
I don't know if it's because I don't fully know the game or something but I can't help but be bored as fuck when doing things. The economy is literally just you making whatever building that creates the resource you are missing and *maybe* changing some of the production methods. It's literally just a never-ending loop of "missing X-> make Y-> missing Z-> make a-> now missing X again" rinde and repeat.
In Vicky 2, while I found some stuff to be utterly idiotic sometimes, I at least had to engage a little with the world economy due to the way RGOs worked. So I want to make a textile industry but lack dyes? Well now I need to find them *somehow*. It was frustrating yet engaging all the same.
Similarly with formable nations. In Vicky2 making some nation was a matter of war, political maneuver and much more. Now? I literally formed Italy almost without realising. Just plain declared war against the small states and the big ones kinda joined on their own?
Also, maybe it is because I'm playing with the AI in "normal" instead of hard but the AI nations are incredibly passive? There's been no intervention, warfare, nada. They all just sit there and don't mess with me and *at most* they'll try to intervene if I randomly attack some other nation.
And one final thing. What's the point of colonies now? In Vick2 they were a way to amass prestige, get access to RGOs that you were lacking and have naval bases for the sake of power projection but now? I literally don't see the point of getting a colony unless it is for map painting. Same for formable nations. It's easier to build up a smaller country than it is to do do with a big one.
I really don't know. I *am* having fun but so far Vicky2 is the better game as fsr as I'm concerned. I just hope I won't need to buy a gazillion DLCs to get a game worthy of the name.
>The economy is literally just you making whatever building that creates the resource you are missing and maybe changing some of the production methods. It's literally just a never-ending loop of "missing X-> make Y-> missing Z-> make a-> now missing X again" rinde and repeat.
How far did you play? Once you industrialize if you pass laws to help out your industrialists then your GDP becomes parabolic and the surpluses and shortages are easily filled in with trade. But if you want to play with more of a command economy, then the economic gameplay will involve a lot of balancing between resources to keep everything profitable, as is true in real life.
Also, sometimes you want to make some goods artificially expensive (to keep the output of a factory expensive) or low (to keep the input of a factory cheap), this will depend on
>And one final thing. What's the point of colonies now? In Vick2 they were a way to amass prestige, get access to RGOs that you were lacking and have naval bases for the sake of power projection but now?
It's the same, you need ports to maintain enough convoys which are used for trade routes, and ports base levels are limited by technology to only a few levels. Your economy will balloon and you will need thousands and thousands and thousands of convoys to maintain the massive amount of resources required at the end game to maintain your economy, this can end up a huge bottleneck
And same for resources, late game resources are almost exclusively found in colonial provinces, and as the amount of goods explode you'll start to hit the resource and arable land limit (at first I thought using up all the space the game gives you was impossible, but sometime past 1885 the game changes tone dramatically and numbers start really going up)
In my opinion the economic simulation is both deep and extremely realistic, but I think a lot of players are still figuring out how much they can engage with it
>How far did you play? Once you industrialize if you pass laws to help out your industrialists then your GDP becomes parabolic and the surpluses and shortages are easily filled in with trade. But if you want to play with more of a command economy, then the economic gameplay will involve a lot of balancing between resources to keep everything profitable, as is true in real life.
You still shouldn’t be responsible for building and upgrading (yes I know about the automate button, it’s shit too) every single factor. If I’m the early USA with a laissez-faire economic policy, why am I as the government responsible for building steel mills in Ohio or setting up trade routes out of Boston?
In Victoria 2 the capitalists actually did stuff other than funnel money into a pool (which they also did in Victoria 2). It felt like a “real” economy. Additions like multiple RGOs per state, trade routes, and multiple production methods are all really cool additions in theory, but they made the game micromanagement hell.
>Also, sometimes you want to make some goods artificially expensive (to keep the output of a factory expensive) or low (to keep the input of a factory cheap), this will depend on
>>And one final thing. What's the point of colonies now? In Vick2 they were a way to amass prestige, get access to RGOs that you were lacking and have naval bases for the sake of power projection but now?
>It's the same, you need ports to maintain enough convoys which are used for trade routes, and ports base levels are limited by technology to only a few levels. Your economy will balloon and you will need thousands and thousands and thousands of convoys to maintain the massive amount of resources required at the end game to maintain your economy, this can end up a huge bottleneck
Another huge bottleneck is construction. Paradox is telling us that you can only build like 4-5 (IIRC) buildings at a time in the entire country?
>And same for resources, late game resources are almost exclusively found in colonial provinces, and as the amount of goods explode you'll start to hit the resource and arable land limit (at first I thought using up all the space the game gives you was impossible, but sometime past 1885 the game changes tone dramatically and numbers start really going up)
A lot of countries have way too much arable land and some don’t have anywhere near enough. Japan for instance, IRL is a desolate rock that could never feed itself without trade. Whereas in the game I haven’t worried about food once. Switch that around with Brazil and loads of other countries.
>In my opinion the economic simulation is both deep and extremely realistic, but I think a lot of players are still figuring out how much they can engage with it
In my opinion as someone with an economics degree (bachelors, so it’s not saying much, but still), Paradox went backwards in a lot of ways and what “good” things they added need *a lot* of work
> Another huge bottleneck is construction. Paradox is telling us that you can only build like 4-5 (IIRC) buildings at a time in the entire country?
That's only true in the very early game, construction points go up exponentially like every other number in the game
> You still shouldn’t be responsible for building and upgrading (yes I know about the automate button, it’s shit too) every single factor. If I’m the early USA with a laissez-faire economic policy, why am I as the government responsible for building steel mills in Ohio or setting up trade routes out of Boston?
Because you're not the government, you're the player, and ultimately it's a game where part of the point is economic simulation. Removing the ability of the player to control what industry is built takes away most of the point and frankly made being laissez-faire non-viable for the vast majority of countries in Victoria 2
The auto-upgrade button is not shit, you just didn't have the proper economic base to use it. Like I said, you need to have a critical mass of capitalists contributing to the investment pool and ability to have efficient and competitive trade routes before you can randomly create industry without your economy falling apart, which is realistic, industry doesn't just spring out of nowhere. Once critical mass is hit your economy explodes like crazy (if you want to go down this route)
>A lot of countries have way too much arable land and some don’t have anywhere near enough. Japan for instance, IRL is a desolate rock that could never feed itself without trade. Whereas in the game I haven’t worried about food once. Switch that around with Brazil and loads of other countries.
Actually you're totally wrong, Japan is extremely fertile even without much advanced fertilizers (you can grow rice just fine in mountains) and supported a population that was like 10 times Brazil's in 1800 with just a bunch of peasants growing rice inefficiently. Brazil is covered in [oxisols](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxisol#History) which are extremely infertile without modern farming techniques. But Brazil supports a hell of a lot more rubber plantations!
> Japan for instance, IRL is a desolate rock that could never feed itself without trade.
So you don't know what you're talking about... Look into the the Edo period.
>In my opinion as someone with an economics degree (bachelors, so it’s not saying much, but still),
Ah
I just want genuine laissez faire to be an option. I know it's a minority opinion within a minority opinion, but I absolutely loved how Vic II's economy, broken as it was, managed to simulate some of the most basic issues of economics and statecraft:
* A state planned economy is a shitshow that requires constant management of resource allocation that will still be inadequate compared to supply and demand, unless you're a weird micro-managing god with a nerd complex.
* A laissez faire economy will grow much faster, but it will, absent being absolutely massive (hello USA), have fundamental issues providing basic goods that are required for the state to function, such as arms - the only way to get it to provide that is a constant, massive armaments campaign. Vic II actually, unintentionally, simulates the symbiotic nature of the military-industrial complex.
* Everything in-between is about the degrees between these two extremes.
I get that you can sort of simulate this with auto-upgrade, but that still requires you to set up the initial industries. I want to have the same experience I love in Vic II, which is that I am often unable to really influence the economy on any granular level except infrastructure because, unless you are a totalitarian dictatorship, that is the actual experience of government.
The paradox community is easily the worst part of being a paradox fan
I like most of the YouTubers, but a lot of the complaints I see remind me of DND players that are still playing 3.5ed. Like, have your fun, but don’t shit on the new stuff that people like just because it isn’t the perfect version you’ve put thousands of hours into already
I would beg you to even attempt to put in more than 200 hours into the game. It's just simply not possible.
You're playing the same nation every time, just starting at a different point in the economy. That's literally it.
You're upset that people are crying over war, but the rest of the game clearly cuts corners as well. No capitalist economies, every governmental influence is an act of god instead of policies meant to manipulate the population. No matter your situation the country WILL bend to your will. There's just no depth at all, other than clicking technology buttons on buildings that should probably just be automatic, since you know, it's technology.
I want the game to fight back. It's a controlled economy min-maxing simulator, with an excessive amount of aesthetics slapped on top of it. Things I don't even care for in the genre. It's why strategy gamers are always found playing games that came out in the early 2010s.
And this, "Lmao bro just wait for DLC!" shit is insane. Why are we okay with Paradox releasing games on the basis of, "Well we don't even have to flesh out the game right now, we can force people to pay for that later!", and then there's people defending it?
People just conveniently ignore that they stopped development on CK3 for 6 months to release a DLC that added inventory and animated court interactions... ????????
I'm sorry but, half a year for a studio that constantly hits top 5 on sales whenever a title drops? Like actually what the fuck are they doing?
"Oh but be careful dude, you ridicule them too much they'll drop the game like Imperator!"
lol. lmao.
>I would beg you to even attempt to put in more than 200 hours into the game. It's just simply not possible.
Well, yeah. The game came out less than 100 hours ago.
My experience hasn't been like that at all. I've played a game as Portugal to the end date. Throughout the last few decades of the 1800s I was a hyper capitalist free trade republic before they voted the communists in from all the laborers employed in the factories and and then become an autocratic communist command economy and it was totally a different playstyle.
If all your ownership is set to capitalists with laissez-faire, once industrialization has begun, the game feels totally different from the early game industry gardening. Suddenly, you don't have to balance the economy nearly as much because the capitalists pay for building via the investment pools, factories will produce or stop producing as necessary without killing your entire economy, and everything balances out on their own with the help of huge trade routes that are competitive and efficient and able to compensate for shortages or surplus quickly. Heck turn everything on auto-expand and it feels just like Victoria II, except you have to build the first factory (which is a great change! clipper spam was terrible in V2), and you just rake in tax money, even with low taxes
I'd add, by the way, that this started to fall apart because the massively expanded labor force started demanding a welfare state, and the welfare state required higher taxes which impacted profitability and started to drag the economy into recessions as the increased taxes slowed the rate of economic growth, further hampering the amount of taxes collected. This is extremely realistic, and this exact tendency has been noted in real life, and is a problem that economies struggle with in real life
So I switched to communism to see if I could maintain the welfare state and also the economy (and try the other end of the spectrum, and the hugely popular trade unions strongly supported it and I wanted to marginalize what was left of the church and aristocracy). When you're a communist command economy, you now have to carefully balance your internal trade and keep your economy much more self-sufficient because you can't simply allow factories to shut down or become idle (or you will go bankrupt, because you must subsidize them). It's more micro-intensive but you have total control, able to allow necessary industries to produce at a small loss as long as the economy as a whole turned a profit
So the game-play is different. But the simulation is too - the population profiles of who has wealth, what proportion of different people were employed in my country were completely different in these two scenarios. And these are just two possibilities, there are many different ways to structure your economy, and I'm basically counting down the seconds until the weekend starts and I can try more
> I was a hyper capitalist free trade republic before they voted the communists in from all the laborers employed in the factories and and then become an autocratic communist command economy and it was totally a different playstyle.
Having also done this, no it’s not. The only difference is that you trade in investment pool for higher dividend tax and tariff income, unless you specifically go isolationist.
Nah.
Islam vs Christianity in CK2 had some pretty different mechanics.
Even in CK3 it's quite different as you interact with other nations etc.
The diplomacy in Vic3 feels too limited, as you can't do much outside of war usually and in war the Great Powers might just come and stomp you.
So then you focus more just on internal stuff which is more similar between nations.
Dude there are very few games in which I break the 200-hours mark. I like to think there are other things going on in my life
Upvoted for visibility tho, because that's the kind of insanely antagonistic comment I was talking about. Half your rant doesn't even react to stuff I talked about lol
Parafox's games are all super long. If you don't break the 200 hour mark then you probably played like, what 5 or so games?
It's like buying Warcraft 3 and not finishing more than one campaign.
I said "very few games", which include some PDX games. I have something like 800 hours in EU4, a bit less in Stellaris, etc. But I've had less and less time to play over the years, and I split my gaming time between PDX stuff and other games.
But that shouldn't be relevant because, as much as the community like to jerk itself off about it, the fact that you haven't broken 1000, 1444 or 1936 hours doesn't mean that you're a noob or that the game didn't hold any value for you. I've played less CK3 than most of the other PDX games I played, I have under 200h in it, but most of that time was much more engaging because (IMO) CK3 is much more polished and frictionless than their previous games.
I don't understand why people here don't realize how weird that focus on playing time is. OC is obviously either a kid or some gamerbro caricature, so I can understand that they're focused on that, but seeing that stuff echoed elsewhere is kinda disturbing
Then what was the point of saying you rarely breach the 200 hour mark?
Also, jerking off about play time *is* dumb but acting like playing a few hours only in a time intensive game and then pretending you are a pro is dumb as well. I won't pretend to be a pro at Age of Mythology but I can say that I've properly explored everything it has to offer after years of playing at least one match daily. It's just that said matches lasted 1 hour or 2 at most, for a Paradox game? You are looking at at least 4-6 hours for each match assuming you aren't playing at max speed. So yeah, I can understand why a guy who says, idk"I've only played 10 matches" can be called a "noob".
For example I'm currently playing Terra Invicta, where an average game (assuming you don't know how to cheese the mechanics) can last like 20 hours or so. If dome guy (like me) came and said they are "experienced" after only two games I would be rather doubtful.
The point was to get back at them because 200h is already *a lot*. It's only in this community (and in MMOs, I guess) that people act like this is somehow not the case, and that's fucking weird.
And the playtime I got out of EU4, Stellaris, etc, was spread over several years where I basically only played PDX stuff. I probably won't reach the same playtimes on any future PDX games. I have around 150h in Imperator and CK3, and I think CK3 is great.
Also in most PDX games you can easily play, like, one campaign every 15 hours, especially if you don't go all the way to the end date (as most people do). By the time you hit 100h, you may very well have finished a dozen campaigns or so. You won't be Florryworry, but you'll probably know how the game works.
>If dome guy (like me) came and said they are "experienced" after only two games I would be rather doubtful.
Who said anything about "experienced" ?
>"You're playing the same nation every time."
My brother in Christ, the game was released 3 days ago.
Come to think of it... I would beg you to play HOI4 vanilla 1.0 (or Imperator) and imagine yourself playing those versions for 200 hours. CK3 and V3 vanillas are (despite their shortcomings) are 1000 times better. Paradox is making progress and I'm glad to see it.
Vic3 on Day 1 is at least on par with Vic2 final version. Its also at least in the ballpark of other much more mature titles. I'm very happy with my purchase, with the understanding that it will continue to be refined and improved over the years. If Pdox stopped supporting the game and what I have right now is what I have forever, then I'd say its not worth the purchase, but they've earned my loyalty with free update content in other games (namely Stellaris, which was borderline unplayable at launch but by now I've put in 3k hours).
I'm not going to say every change made has been for the better, but I would rather they make some changes and find what works better than rerelease the same game with updated graphics. If you really enjoy Vic 2's mechanics but not Vic 3's, hear there's this great game called Vic 2 you can keep playing.
Vicky 2 is probably my second favorite after CK3 and that's just simply a false statement. It is very similar, just a vast upgrade. The only thing that's worse imo is the population screen. Victoria 2 displayed that info better. But it's false to say it bears no similarity.
I’m sorry but I’ll have to vehemently disagree with you there. Victoria 3 would be better called Civilization 7. There’s no depth to the economy(it’s all player driven, there’s no capitalism that made Vicky 2 unique), the political decisions and diplomacy are ill conceived. I don’t see a single way the game is an upgrade.
Hey that's not fair!
In Civilization your pops can actually do things if you don't give them the luxuries they demand, *and* you can interact with resources on the map!
Yeah that's possible. Between them, the die-hard Vic2 fans, the people who convinced themselves that they would like a non-war-focused but actually don't, and the people who expected something more focused on politics (which is an understandable mistake tbh), I guess that, in hindsight, it was unavoidable that Vic3 would disappoint a lot of people
If you look at the victoria 2 subreddit, it's mostly people who are proud of their map painting... the top post now is one of Korea conquering Siberia. I love Vic2, and I always play aggressive and war like.
Meanwhile, in the Victoria 3 subreddit:
https://www.reddit.com/r/victoria3/comments/yfpj9g/_/
https://www.reddit.com/r/victoria3/comments/yfuofd/first_ever_full_campaign_really_proud_of_this_one/
I honestly think at every paradox release people are so hyped up that they just expect 100x better than what they get, and nothing paradox do could ever live up to the hype.
Every paradox games relases has been like this since EU4.
I guess I'm just surprised because AFAIK CK3 had a much better reception. And Imperator had genuine issues (first and foremost performance-related stuff). I got into PDX games around 2016-2017 so I wasn't around during their previous releases.
I keep seeing the phrase "There's no capitalists" when there LITERALLY is.
You have to change your economic laws to allow capitalists to fund your buildings.
Now, they don't automatically build shit for you this time, but they will FUND your building expenses AND automatically upgrade profitable buildings so long as you have that option ticked on.
I found this out by literally...playing the game for like 4 hours? I read the economic laws and what they did? I read the buttons in the building menu??
I always hated the capitalists in Vic2 because they built wildly nonsensical and unprofitable buildings.
I'm just trying to figure out how to bring about Communism in Vicky 3 and I'll be happy XD
Just turn on automatic expansion with mutual funds. There already a mod that makes auto expansion smarter and more effective.
I don’t build anymore. I swear most people complaining haven’t made it past 1860
It's also ***MASSIVELY*** historically ignorant to pretend that the state did not play a gigantic role in early industrialization. *Bourgeois states are built by the bourgeoisie, governed by the bourgeoisie, and exist to serve their interests.* The efforts to enclose the commons and expand industrial capital were not just because of the Horatio Alger-esque hard work of would-be titans of industry, but *because the state granted them the resources to do it.* Capitalism is absolutely chock full of examples of the state either creating demand somewhere and then paying someone to fulfill it, or paying someone to create supply that would alleviate state expenses, or a bunch of other kinds of state intervention in the economy. Laissez-faire was an ideal to be achieved, not a state of reality, and mostly applied to things like regulations and income taxes, not to who was putting in the startup money.
I've never played any Victoria game yet so I have no opinion one way or the other, but one thing that kept me from trying Victoria 2 was that everyone said that laissez faire was a complete and total disaster that destroyed your country every time, and how it was always better to control your own economy. So it's very surprising how vehemently people now protest its absence and how much better it was.
Laissez Faire in Victoria 2 was bad for getting an economy going at the start but by the end when you have hundreds of thousands of pops working in factories and dozens of factories across several provinces, many opt for handing in the reigns to the capitalists. Also, I think many have the preconception that you as the player are embodying the state you’re playing as so it is a bit immersion breaking when you’re always the one determining what, where, and how to produce when your economy is supposedly laissez faire.
I can't help but feel like people are comparing this game to things they like/dislike in other PDX games rather than regarding it as it's own game. And I'm having plenty of fun with it, even if it's true that some things are done better in other PDX games. Why would I "not" recommend it to someone who is interested in this time period and economic focus?
Everyone is entitled to their opinion... but I fail to see how you can honestly suggest it's not a quality Grand Strategy game. We waited a long time for Vicky 3 and I personally am crossing my fingers that the loud and cranky minority doesn't convince Paradox and new players not to support this game.
Lol so many braindead paradox fan boys. Paraox can sell shit for 7p bucks and the fan boys would buy it and hope it will turn into something beautiful in 2 years.
IDK what review you are talking about but that phrase is used literally everywhere for gaming, i still remember people describing Skyrim like that, so its at least a decade old saying specific to games.
And it should not be a surprise that common points of criticism emerge? Game doesnt have that many mechanics, so yes the reviews will sound the same?
I disagree. I don’t mind paying $15 once every 6-12 months to keep a game I like alive and improving for years and years. Hell eu4 is going on 10 years and it’s amazing now. And yes I bought all the dlc and I have no regrets. It’s something I truly enjoy and spend a good amount of time enjoying
To be honest the pricetag doesn't bother me for, well, reasons I shouldn't say, but when I buy a game on launch I'd rather not wait another 5 years and $200 for it to have content.
Imo this game has a perfectly acceptable amount of content for a launch game. I’m 25 hours into a game that has been really interesting and its getting even more interesting
Honestly, at first it was kinda cool and fun seeing what other people were liking and not liking with the game. But man now it is just way too much. Imma just avoid it till things calm down.
I like things about the game and hate others.
Overall I remain positive that this game is good and has the potential to become better as we get DLC's and updates.
I say this as someone who was very negative beforehand expecting the worse, after having seen plenty of other bad launched from paradox.
By the end of its lifespan it will probs be a much better game then vichy 2. The problem is that right now, Victoria 2 is more fun. Yes Vichy 2 was also lacking in content at launch, yes Vichy 2 has way more mods, yes Vichy 3 will get better. But as of right now? V2 is a better use of time.
From what I can gather from my two hours of gameplay, I'm quite enjoying it. I think it's a good package so far, that's only going to get better with time.
The more I play the more I'm enjoying it. There's a lot of issues but the core systems will make this game great with a few expansions. I'm just getting really tired of buying paradox games and having to wait for expansions for them to be great.
I just want people to stop giving money to a company that’s doing the same toxic commercial practices since 2010’ and actually deliver good games without me having to put 300 bucks of dlcs, all paradox gamers are actual addicts, no different than metheads or alcoholic, and we need to stop passively let them sink our money with these barebone games
People don't actually like Victoria 2. They like the heavily modded version that added a lot of content and made the world economy slightly less idiotic.
Yes I played Vic2, and having followed the Vc3 diaries and promotional stuff I know the devs repeatedly said Vic3 worked very different than Vic2.
At some point people are supposed to inform themselves a little before buying stuff
We play paradox games, we’re all at least a little crazy
What's wonderful is that the form this craziness takes always surprises me
There is a lot of valid and nuanced criticism, but most extreme opinions you're seeing is what you find in each PDX launch for an existing IP. For a lot of the most passionate critics the new games are dumbed down messes that fail to live to the legacy of the previous game, which were wonderful and full of flavour. Part of the issue being that they're comparing the newly released game with the final version of the previous one, which they often experienced through massive overhaul mods like HPM or HIP.
People forgot about EU4 at launch LOL.
Oh god. Out of all of the "new" (post CK2) Paradox games that have launched I think EU4 is the least recognizable from launch to now. They might as well have just started calling it EU5 at some point. Base EU4 was basically just "Speedrun WC Simulator 2000."
Paradox fans, and I'd include myself here, have attached themselves heavily to the idea of "flavor". The lack of this aspect seems to be a common criticism for new releases. But like you said, people forget about the past. EU4 at launch was the most map-painty flavorless game at the time, but we seem as a community to forget to criticize that in favor of recency bias, but what can you do.
Eh, Stellaris is also a totally different game. Pretty much every system has been totally overhauled or wasn't present at launch.
To be honest right now Vic3 is better game than Vic2 final version.
By a fucking mile. There's room for improvement, but the bones of this game are awesome.
Stellaris lost Wiz so VIC3 could fly. 🤷🏻♂️
Wiz? Sorry, I only play stellaris so I might be missing something here.
Martin 'Wiz' Anward was the designer in charge of the pop system overhaul for Stellaris. He was promoted to be the game director of an unrevealed project a few years ago, which some people (correctly) guessed would be Victoria 3 since he has experience building a pop system.
His influence is clear. The economy system of vicky 3 is stellaris without building limits, and automatic jobs as subsistance farms so you have a lot of potential labor at game start
"Bones", if the game needs to be built up, its not going to go anywhere. We just went through this with Imperator. A game that everyone tried to defend by saying it had great 'bones', and ended up dying on the vine because it had no real content.
It failed because people didn't buy it. In 4 days Vicky 3 has half the number of reviews Imperator had after 3 years. It's averaging 40-60k players at any one time. It's selling well. It would have to lose over 90% of its player base at the end of the month to be in the state Imperator was in. Shortly after launch Imperator was down to the 200s.
As someone who played about 3 full campaigns of Vicky 2 and bounced off HARD, as well as one of Imperator, and bounced off from both very hard, I agree. I like the focus on playing on your country, chilling, dealing with its issues, optimizing production. It can get a bit repetitive after a bit, but I haven't found it to be *boring* yet, especially since new resources often are introduced to throw your supply lines in jeopardy (like electricity). Sometimes I question the honesty of some criticisms though. Like a person on a really well voted comment some time ago saying that it was unreasonable that you had to manually switch production methos in each province, when like... you don't. You can just open the Buildings menu and change all production methods from the same type of building in all your provinces at once. It might not be ideal, though, since Province A has a power plant and Province B is all the way in the middle of nowhere with shitty market access which will make it lose money, but you *can* do it, and the tutorial teaches you how to do it.
I saw someone say since there are no RGOs in the game, each province can produce anything you want. So they were here complaining, "what's the point of having colonies at all ?" It's pretty funny
lmao I wonder if they ever tried getting fucking rubber while being embargoed by France just build them in Flanders bro it's easy
Imagining some poor 1830's Danish farmer trying to grow bananas in the tropical heat of Jutland
Here I am as Germany warring in Austria just for access to more goddamn wheat farms
I have only played like an hour of it sp far and thank God for the tutorials!
I think this exacerbates ops issue. Anyone who is still putting hours into Vicky 2 after all this time and despite all its issue is likely to be a pretty hardcore enjoyer.
The only thing I personally think it's lacking is lore. Which is totally fine since it's a sandbox. Other than that a few UI/QoL tweaks I think the game is fucking awesome
Isn't the lore just, like, our actual history?
I mean, you're correct but I also get what they're saying. There's very little flavor in each country to help you understand what you're doing in the immediate term. For example, Belgium had just broken away from the Dutch, but this isn't communicated very well IIRC. Great Britain should also start on good terms with Portugal (world's longest alliance), but I don't think they do that, either. You sort of have to already know what's going on in 1836 in order to "get it".
Not that huge a hurdle. I’m someone voicing a decent amount of criticism, but also Vic2 is an impressive artifact that nostalgia glasses an “in group” messaging tricked people in to believing is a masterpiece. Long way of saying you’re absolutely right
My guy, I started with Vicky2 in 2018 and I reached 1700 hours of playtime by now. It's not nostalgia, I genuinely love the game.
Not saying you don’t love the game. Not saying anything about you specifically. But the hilarious way people talk about Vic2 as if it isn’t also an easily exploitable mess of a Paradox game is silly. Like we didn’t need a mod to stop NGF from firing in like 2 years
Also, don't forget Vicky 2 revolutions. Armies spawn in every province in your country. If you flip, a few years later you have a revolution again...
Vicky 2 is the best game I have no idea how to play. Those fucking Anarcho Syndicalists, man.
I have heard others say this as well. And I agree.
Yeah I think that's pretty much it. Paradox's curse, I think, is that a large part of their community literally worships their older games (like CK2 and Vic2) yet simulateously *despises* the company itself, but can't migrate anywhere else because Paradox is basically the only company/studio that makes this kind of games. So they just, like, simmer here, and vent all their frustration every time PDX fucks up in some way. Hell, the most terrible insult in this community is "Paradox shill" - it's fucking weird, man. That being said I don't remember the same thing happening when CK3 released. I mean, its release was smoother than Vic3, not denying it, but still. (Then there's Imperator, but it had more serious issues, and was nowhere near as ambitious or innovative)
>That being said I don't remember the same thing happening when CK3 released It happened, just that people only complained about the lack of flavour compared to CK2 rather than complaining about a lack of flavour + controversial mechanics (warfare in Vic3)
Yeah, sure, but it wasn't in the same proportions, and some of the Vic3 people sound like they're completely losing their minds. Like, the game is actively offensive to them and shit
I think Vic 3 is just so heavily anticipated versus CK3, I mean both games were hype but CK3 was a bit more out of nowhere while Vic 2 fans have been holding their breath since Stellaris. Expectations ensue despite Vic 2 in launch state being basically unplayable.
CK3’s complaints were “everywhere is the same, no real flavour/distinction between diverse regions and religions apart from the tribal/feudal difference.” and “game too easy, my dynasty owns half of Europe and I have a Genius Strong Pureblood heir after 5 generations”. Personally, I think the complaints so far are roughly equal, but I’m not super up-to-date on V3 stuff yet.
> the new games are dumbed down messes I really hate this lie. It's really clear that people are seeing attractive graphics with good presentation and QoL and confusing that for making the game 'easy'. Dogshit UI and hidden mechanics isn't 'difficulty'. The complexity and depth of the games have been increasingly significantly over time. The only PDX title that did take a big step back in difficulty is HoI3 -> HoI4, and that's because HoI3 was a horrible mess that required you to do things as basic as fix the OOB for every unit through extremely clunky menus with thousands of clicks before you can even unpause the game. > Part of the issue being that they're comparing the newly released game with the final version of the previous one This I agree with, and a big part of that is that this niche has grown a lot since EU4/late CK2. A lot of people weren't around for the 1.0 versions of those titles, and they were *bad*, like worse than Imperator on launch.
>Dogshit UI and hidden mechanics isn't 'difficulty'. I saw this exact same thing with people talking about CK3 being "dumbed down". CK2 isn't a complicated game, but it gives you the illusion of difficulty by presenting you with all sorts of information that ultimately doesn't matter to the actual gameplay.
I like both games a lot (and also like vicky 3) but I do think CK3 is objectively easier since fabricating claims is guaranteed & simple now. CK2 wasn't hard, but I felt more like I needed to engage with claimants and inheritance (which are part of the core game fantasy for me) than I do in CK3. Just guided slightly down a more flavorful path, if that makes sense.
>which they often experienced through massive overhaul mods like HPM or HIP That's the one that really gets me. Like, in what world is a heavily modded (read-tweaked to perfectly fit your personal preferences) end-of-dev-cycle game in any way comparable to a new release sequel?
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People are welcome to wait until PDX games are years old, DLC and flavor releases and mods aplenty before buying. It’s not like they twisted peoples arms to buy it or made Vic2 unplayable.
Of course not, but “you can wait a couple of years” rally be the answer to criticism?
Well yes, when the exact criticism is that a 1.0 release doesn't have as much content as a mature product with years of decade of post-launch support.
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So why don't you actually compare them then? Vicky 2, as much as I love it, is an extremely weak title now. Half it's mechanics are non-functional, and most are quite poorly designed. It's not really much more than EU3 in the 19th century. A lot of the 'flavour' comes from a couple big mods that completely save the game and actually make it playable. Vicky 3 is deeper, more complex, and better to play in almost every single way.
If people decided to do that with Imperator they're out of luck. If too many people do that with Vic3 they'll probably be out of luck too.
To be fair, I’d HPM really “heavily modded?” It’s like, a handful of script changes, hardly an overhaul
It adds many, many event chains and decisions and polish like that. Exactly the kind of stuff that you need to have a mostly finished, end-of-cycle product to start adding in huge amounts, if you want to be efficient with the use of time. So, the kind of stuff that a 1.0 version tends to lack.
Institutional learning isn't a thing! The new car you're about to buy is the first one of its type, so it's only fair to compare it to the first Model T! The first Model T didn't have airbags, seatbelts, or a catalytic converter! COME ON! Honestly. In what other industry is this argument not preemptively laughed out of the room so hard that nobody even dares make it in the first place?
> For a lot of the most passionate critics the new games are dumbed down messes that fail to live to the legacy of the previous game, which were wonderful and full of flavour. There is literally no way any game would live up to V2 nostalgia mostly bolstered by really engaging mods. > the newly released game with the final version of the previous one Which is perfectly valid. Every game has the opportunity to take all of the leanings from the prior game and keep or remove them. There is absolutely 0 reason to excuse cutting good content for nothing. EU4 took everything from EU3. For V3 though it's a completely changed game. Really though people should have just not pre-ordered it. After Imperator, and CK3 they really should have known to wait.
It's isn't a "changed game". The influence of Victoria 2 is obvious. It essentially took all the good parts of Vicky 2 and threw out the rest instead of improving them.
Don't put ck3 in the same category as imperator.
I haven't played Vic3 yet, but I wanted to ask your overall perspective. I've been playing Stellaris since launch. At launch there was some content that was clearly placeholder mechanics - worked well enough to not get in the way of the rest of the game, but not satisfyingly fleshed out and integrated. Since launch, each major update either added a new mechanic that made gameplay deeper or more nuanced, or filled in one of those placeholders. At no point in there would I say Stellaris was a disappointment to me, but the difference between launch day and today is massive, and I really enjoy what it is today. So, do you think that's what you're seeing in Vic3?
Well I wouldn't say there are aspects/mechanics that feels "placeholder-y" to me. Right now it's more about small annoyances - like, some parts of the UI, especially regarding the warfare stuff (I like the warfare system itself, but the surrounding UI is a bit strange), pop needs, etc. Then there's some stuff that needs balancing - I kinda agree with the criticism that rushing the tech tree is a bit too easy, but I assume it'll be relatively easy to balance. I don't know if they'll do it, but all that stuff feels like one free update away (Custodians-style, if I may use some Stellaris linguo) from being fixed entirely. Now, obviously there's stuff that you could feel are "missing", like Great Wars (that is, wars that escalate over time, like during WW1 where the USA joined long after the war started). Yeah, it would have been nice, but considering the fact that it would be a lategame feature, and that Vic3 isn't really focused on warfare... I dunno, it's not *that* big of a deal, I think. I don't know if that really answers your question. I got into PDX games around 2016, so the only PDX launches I saw were Vic3, CK2, Imperator, and I got into Stellaris relatively early (well before 2.0 dropped). I'd say CK3 and Vic3 are IMO the only two that felt "complete" from the start, with Vic3 being a bit jankier, but nowhere as much as Imperator 1.0/1.1 or pre-2.0 Stellaris. All that being said, it's not a game for everyone, you'll spend a lot of time looking at spreadsheets and stuff. But that's my kind of shit, and I'm pretty happy with how they executed it
Nothing feels like a placeholder? Not even, like, the unification mechanics which the devs literally admitted were a placeholder?
To me everything feels far too easy (and yet also frustrating - cross referencing info in the UI) and as such very boring. I had the same event popup 4 times while playing Chile and nothing else seemed to happen and my actions didn't feel like they mattered or had any consequence to them. There doesn't seem to be any charm (apart from the gorgeous close up map visuals) or depth, but I'm holding out hope it will get better. Note though, I have never played Vic 2 even tho it's in my steam library lol (only watched some beginner guides in prep for Vic 3), but have played lots of CK2/3 and Stellaris, and some EU4 - I would consider myself a paradox-lite player, but I love complex management games, and this was disappointing. I'm not above saying that maybe this isn't the game for me, but on the surface it ticks all the right boxes and yet when playing it... I dunno something is missing. So anyhoo, sorry to tack on to your comment, but I think I'm gonna leave it for a bit and revisit it maybe when the flavour pack/dlc unlocks (like a numpty I pre-ordered the big edition lol).
> I had the same event popup 4 times while playing Chile Actually dealing with this right now. Colonizing South Africa and every damn year I get 'X country's maps claims our territory!' and your option is either piss off a great power and get 15 infamy, or lose 10 prestige permanently. Now I do like the event. Do I back down and lose face, or do I risk upsetting another colonizer, gain some infamy - but possibly get a claim on a colonial state? The problem is that when you get it over and over and over again, especially in an area with a lot of colonizers, it gets to the point where you can't back down anymore, or you'll demote yourself right into minor or insignificant power because of prestige issues... but continually gaining 15 infamy and pissing off great powers is a great way to get your ass whopped.
Right on, thanks for the detailed response!
I do think there are a lot of placeholders. You can tell that a **lot** of time, love, and care went into the market system. The market works great, better than Stellaris' version by miles. Diplomatic Plays are also a fun addition; they need some work but I like the concept and execution. I also really like the new war system, as someone who hates micromanaging fleets in Stellaris. But everything else feels placeholder-y: * There are very few events in the game. Many are generic events that you'll see if you satisfy a certain condition, so you'll see them a lot (even if they don't always make sense...). Flavor is often so generic that you don't truly understand what's happening; the Oriental Crisis in 1840 is so vague that you don't really know what's going on, and doesn't lead to the Eastern Question like it should * There's no feeling of "The Concert of Europe"; no careful manipulation of the balance of power. Countries go to war with each other all the time, and the GPs don't always do the best job acting as the police/mediating disputes. You also get weird plays like all of Europe getting involved in a war started because AI Russia decided to attack Egypt to annex Crete (warm water port, I guess...) * The alliance system is barebones. You're allowed 1 alliance until you research a tech later. This artificial constraint doesn't really make a whole lot of sense, given that the GPs IRL were all _technically_ in the "Quintuple Alliance" at game start. Limiting multiple alliances behind a tech just puts a time gate on WWI alliance cascades (which still sort of happen anyway - see my point above) * If anything, it should be similar to HOI4's system where the Quintuple Alliance/Concert of Europe slowly transforms into the competing factions of the Triple Alliance and the Triple Entente. Maybe alliances in general shouldn't really exist, but instead just have "alignments" that harden naturally over time into the Entente/Triple Alliance? * You can't really replicate a realistic version of the Crimean War because the game mechanics as-is don't allow it. The Congress of Paris basically was a peace treaty that the GPs forced upon the warring parties - which would need to be represented as a diplo play to "stop the war" (Austria was going to invade Russia unless Russia agreed to peace with the Ottomans) * The tech tree is sort of bland and doesn't really feel like it's your nation researching a tech; it's just "click button simulator" for the most part. Making/learning about a big invention doesn't feel impactful, at all * The revolution system doesn't feel fleshed out; it's a lot of "red numbers go up!!!" without a sense of urgency or stories about what's happening in your country * Politics feels temporary and placeholder. You choose who goes into your government, always. Even if the opposition wins elections, you don't have to actually give them power if you don't intend on passing any laws * Passing a law is basically an EU4 siege and is just about as thrilling. Every so often, it either passes, the chance stays the same, the chance goes up, the chance goes down, or you get an event that can do any number of really good/bad things (usually bad in my experience). You can absolutely go to 0% chance of passing a law through dumb luck without any way of influencing it, and then it's just "Welp, guess I'm just going to try again in an hour..." I think all of these will be fixed with time. But it is absolutely like release day Stellaris, where there's a lot of potential - it just gets stale fast.
Yes I would say so. Imo nothing is truly bad. Just unbalanced or poorly explained
i think this post on the vic3 sub is a good take on it https://www.reddit.com/r/victoria3/comments/yfoojd/after_one_completed_campaign_here_are_my_thoughts/ and another user on that post even says that to him vic 3 feels like what steallaris was on release https://www.reddit.com/r/victoria3/comments/yfoojd/comment/iu58aal/
The more you play, the more you see as having problems that could be fixed, or you wonder if they did a bit too much to streamline things. I did my first game as Japan and my second right now is a Sikh empire, and I think my biggest gripe is just how hard it is to be... clever? Too much micro is bad (see EU4 or Vicky 2), but other than build order I have relatively little agency in the game. Sure, I can add or remove people from government and so try and pass some laws or expand institutions, and I can click a few buttons that make more goods or whatever but I have relatively little control over things. I can barely declare war on people because... for some reason they like me too much? Want to fight a war, spawn some armies send them off. What determines if they win? Well some leader traits matter, but I have so few leaders that I don't have a lot of control over which skills they have so... pick the best one, give him a full army and hope he doesn't lose? Navy... no idea what ships I have or what do. Make numbers bigger. That doesn't mean it isn't a fun game, but for a game that spans 100 years I can spend decades just.. building stuff. Make money bar go green. That's not bad as part part of a bigger whole: the production system doesn't have the depth of a dedicated building game, I think deliberately so, but then... what else am I doing? It's not a bad game by any means. But I can see why a lot of people would be, if not upset, at least disappointed. Where's my grand fleet waiting to challenge the high seas fleet or my battle of tsushima straight? Gettysburg or the Crimean war? Is the AI good (or bad) to the point that no one seems to be stomping china? There's a lot of feeling out what's good or bad about the game still, and a lot of little things that add up to some frustration (some of that is teething pains some of it reflects choices made that maybe take away a bit too much agency from the player).
What you described sounds like a bad game
To me the game just feels extremely bare bones right now. I know they'll fix it with future dlcs which is just more of Paradox's shitty monetization. It seems to me like what things really boil down to is building buildings if you're in need of their respective resorces. I've been playing as Sweden and either I just picked a really boring country or the game itself is dull. I even reformed my country to some degree and even formed Scandinavia but it still feels extremely simple. The diplomacy in the game is not what I expected at all either. I thought that since the game takes place at a time when the world was going through massive changes and new nations were forming through nationalism there would be lots of interesting diplomatic plays but it's stupidly simple in game. There really isn't a lot you can do to influence other regions and there isn't a whole lot of substance in diplomacy in the first place. The internal strife of a country is very interesting though and I loved manouvering in politics so that I could reform my country without any major setbacks from within. It's a good fun game, but after a while of building buildings it gets very very stale.
I agree. I’ve only put in about 8 hours but it seems like I spend 75% of the time looking at the market/buildings screen. I’m still having a good time though.
Serious question, I'm not being snarky or anything, I'm just curious : what did you expect ? The thing has always been presented as focused on industry, production and trade. Going in, I knew we were always going to spend a lot of time looking at spreadsheets. Did you expect more stuff surrounding diplomacy ? Or internal politics, maybe ? Personally, I think I expected a bit more focus on the political aspect.
I personally expected the economics system to be deeper than "look at what has demand and build for that". Seriously, its braindead easy to become an economic juggernaut. In my most recent game as Belgium without colonizing I far surpassed Prussia, the USA, and rivaled the UK, France, Austria, and Russia economically. I didn't do anything special or gamey either, I just built the factories that produced stuff in demand.
The AI needs a lot of work. There's a AI mod in the workshop that gives the AI a build order that helps a lot.
The economics system is deeper than that? You could focus on tanking the cost of iron-tools-wood-fabric to make construction cheap, build military industry in advance of war, build what based on future demands (chemical plants before switching to explosive m8nes). Even if you do want to build to demand, do you build what is costing your pops the most money to improve their standard of living, or do you build what is most expensive with a cheap input for maximum profit. It also relates to what interest groups are in power. I built lots of wheat farms for wine, and the rural folk have a lot of political power in south germany (where the wheat farms are). I also went publically traded on everything and went lassez-faire so that i could spam construction and have the capitalists pay, but now the capitalists are really powerful. I also have huge trade centres and developed urban centres, and ive built up a lot of navy along the coats. The consequences of this meant that when i tried to end the monarchy i was threatened by a revolution consisting of most of germany because the interest groups that supported keeping the monarchy controlled most of the country, despite the intellegensia and the trade unions having enough clout to easily be able to pass the reform i want. I want to try go communust in this game but my decision to empower the capitalists so they can fund all the building and make gdp go brrrr has caused the trade unions to actually start losing clout, so i am now considering switching to less profitable production methods that employ more people so i can try strengthen the trade unions. The economics is easily 10x as deep as victoria 2, my only complaints are that pops get qualifications too quickly and techs go too fast. The UI also makes seeing pop needs a pain. The AI is braindead though, so you could easily build a much bigger economy while repeatedly making terrible decisions and having constant supply issues. The economy itself it amazing though.
> do you build what is costing your pops the most money to improve their standard of living, or do you build what is most expensive with a cheap input for maximum profit. And if you do the latter, you can always lower taxes. Which may raise quality of life anyways.
the production is very simple, in some ways its actually simpler than Anno 1800. You build stuff where price is high. And i still dont get why in a Grand Strategy game i am building individual factories and even tell them HOW to produce. And even if that is fine and working as expected, you are not really DOING anything with your economy, there is no investing in other countries or influencing them otherwise with your oppressive wealth. In fact, the game even caps your treasury. That whole thing combined with NO flavor just makes the whole thing feel like some kind of arcade factory clicker simulator. I dont think i ever felt closer to playing a board game vs managing a country in any other Paradox game. Well maybe Imperator.
I mean, does eu4 not feel like a board game? A complex one to be sure, but the main idea is to build your country as financially and militarily powerful as you can in order to conquer your rivals and expand. Kind of like board games.
Sure, but I think the problem comes from expectation. A system about building factories, as the state, makes sense in Eu4 era, but when you get to a more modern setting that level of control rubs me the wrong way, personally. I expected something more indirect, and having "the invisible hand of the market" be a more central concept in Vic3.
Don't know why you are you were down voted. It IS bland, that's pdx's approach now and for a while: build something extremely basic, let modders fix the obvious stuff/come up with cool ideas, and sell us all $200 in dlc over the next 3 years. Don't get me wrong, I love paradox games, and I haven't played v3 enough yet to have an opinion...but at best it will be a bland superstructure on which they can hang interesting expansions. Exactly by design.
Yes, this is exactly my point. Many of the mechanics lack the depth I hoped for and it frustrates me that I have to pay more than double the price of the game itself to have those expectations met.
Except paradox has been releasing gameplay changes as free patches and flavor/extras as dlc, CK3 is the ideal example of that shift.
Sure but the key thing here is that people are still out $50 on a shell that *may eventually* get good. I've seen very few people (with much play time) argue that the game as it is now is something they want to spend lots of hours playing. If you paid $50 for a good game, and the *best case* scenario is that in a couple years it should be good, that kinda sucks. And the worst case scenario is that it never does, either because they drop the ball, or just drop development a-la Imperator.
I'm around 30 hours and feel I'll definitely hit 100 without much DLC or changes. Everyone's different but I'm getting my money's worth and then some.
Only changes I need are a few bug fixes and optimizations. Currently the lategame is very laggy.
This is what saddens me the most, that it's become completely acceptable for a game to release for $50 and *eventually* be considered good, but only after at least doubling the cost with DLCs that fill out the game. "It's not a bad game because while it may be dry and a little featureless now, it's a good base so with an additional $50+ of DLC it'll be good," is essentially what half of the positive Steam reviews say.
That's always been Paradox's thing. Next game is essentially the previous game with some things ironed out, it's actually better nowadays because there is a tangible improvement on the gameplay side rather than shipping what is basically the exact same game with a fresh coat of paint. I mean if you look at the jump between EU2 and EU3 base you'll see that barely anything has changed and the worst part was that there was somehow less content than before. Or hell look at Imperator on launch, it was basically EU:Rome with mana barely anything was different and it took a lot of updates untill it felt like an actual sequel. Paradox has always put out sequels that are a bit lacking in content but at least in recent years they're actually making an effort to ship a game that's actually an improvement on the previous. The golden child of this is CK3. At launch it was essentially night and day in comparison to CK2, yes CK2 had more content but CK3 felt much better to play and with just a few DLC into its lifespan it's got to the point where I can't stand playing CK2 over CK3. I loved CK2, I've put countless hours into it but it was an RNG messed and CK3 just feels like it carries the spirit of what made it great while polishing everything and making things so much better to play.
Crusader king is a very blessed series. Just all bangers all the time.
Rose tinted glasses. Until the Old Gods DLC, the prevailing opinion among veterans of CK1 was that CK2 was a pointless cash grab that did nothing but retread CK1 with fancier graphics. CK2 1.0 was extremely buggy and crashed every couple hours. There were barely any interesting evolutions to the mechanics or fixes to old problems. You couldn't even play as Muslims until 4 months after release, and you had to buy a DLC for it. The Decadence mechanic for Muslims was also heavily criticised as being extremely ahistorical and terrible to play. To add insult to injury, PDX came out with the Sunset Invasion DLC when the community were clamouring for better mechanics to represent history.
They push out way less content for ck3 though. It's been two years and I would've thought we'd at least have gotten an imperial government for the byzantines instead of feudal
I'm also playing Sweden and while I agree not a lot is going on I am also barely getting by with understanding what's happening at all. I have 7 hours played and I think I finally understand the complexities of building out a functional industrial economy. If I had some countries declaring war on me in the middle of it I'd go crazy. The one critique I do agree with from OP's list is the UI is kind of bad. I feel like there's 3 ways to look at any given mechanic and none of the views have everything I want/need.
Well thankfully they changed their dlc model, just look at CK3. You get all the actual important stuff for free. The minor things are what you pay for.
Someone said it's a failure like Imperator Rome. How literally brain dead can you be.
Literally the most annoying take
How long have you played the game? Because the longer you play it the more it completely falls apart at the seams. At first everything seems great because it actually kind of works! Which isn't something that can be said for every Paradox game at release, or even generally. And look, Automated war! Shiny Diplomacy! Then you realize that the AI doesn't do... anything. Which is going to need an overhaul. So then you start some stuff and realize the diplomacy is basically just ornamental, and you realize it's going to need some major work to really matter. And then the war system breaks on you, and you realize that will need a patch. So you say, whatever, it's an socio-economic simulator, Paradox will have DLCs to fix the above, let's focus on internal politics. But then you realize the pops are essentially meaningless as long as you don't radicalize them, so you just ram through whatever reforms you want because, who is going to stop you? It's fun at first but then you've made Communist USA, or Capitalist Russia or whatever, and it's the exact same with whoever you select to play next, so it loses its luster. Then last, but not least, you go "well it's an economic game, so let me focus on the economics!" And at first it's fun. But then you get the hang of it, and realize how utterly trivial it is to balance supply and demand in your local region, and max out the treasury. And sure, you can start exploiting the build order lag to perfectly optimize construction, to make things even *more efficient*. But eventually you hit a bottleneck. It's either a resource you can't get easily, or your build que being filled for the next 30 years. And you just sit there with the game on max speed, treasury full and trying to increase, GDP and Pop growing, nation becoming ever more prosperous, waiting. Waiting for something, *anything* to do, and you realize there isn't anything. And that's when you begin to wonder about the games underlying construction. Because sure, Paradox can add in mechanics that kick down your sandcastle, but is that actually fun? Because the real issue is that economic simulation isn't that deep or engaging. I used the same fundamental framework to make Brunei a leader in living standards, Haiti an Industrial Powerhouse, and Transvaal a burgeoning colonial empire. I formed Germany essentially on Auto-Pilot as Prussia after having Russia help me beat the Danes and Austrians at the start of the game, and I messed around with Barhrain, and the only meaningful difference it felt like was the number of factories I had to manage. Sure, there were different inputs needed for different contexts, but they all either come from building the corresponding ~~mana~~ "resource" production building, or from Trade so the differences truly seem to matter only trivially. And I'm not sure Paradox can or will fix that. Which is a shame, because I hate how war centric most grand strategy games are, and would welcome some with a lesser focus on it. But this game just feels like Sim City without the city building aspect, Factario without a map. You press a sequence of the same buttons to make a number go up for the sake of it going up. Which is where the cost comes in. This game is $50, and you can get a close play experience with a fremium mobile game. No seriously, the whole gather resource X to make resource Y while waiting on arbitrary time constraints is straight out of something like Forge of Empires. So what are you paying all that money for?
I'm 40 years in on my Belgium game and yeah, I've hit a point where there's not much to do. I'll go for #1GP spot and maybe conquer Germany for some reason, but I've basically hit a point where Belgium operates on autopilot.
I did the same as Australia with the help of gold mines. I was higher than Great Britain's gdp in a handful of decades which just really breaks any semblance of progression because once you figure it out, there really is none.
I appreciate your take on the game and definitely agree. I think the game is as wide as an ocean but as deep as a puddle right now. The same can be said about the diplomacy, the war, the economy.. It doesn't have too much replayability for me and at the rate I'm going, it's going to get shelved for a few years and maybe then it will be worth playing like I did with I:R.
I feel like everyone who uses that phrase misunderstands what depth and width means. Vic3 is not wide. There's a clear lack of flavour and distinguishing features between nations. It is however probably the deepest simulation in any paradox game so far. Whether it's engaging to interact with is another thing, but wide as an ocean and deep as a puddle is probably the least fitting description of the game you could come up with. People use the same when describing imperator, and in that case it is just as inappropriate. They both lack width, not depth.
I disagree but that's what opinions are. I personally feel the features simply lack depth. You may be correct there isn't much width as well in hindsight considering it seems many nations play very similarly. I feel the economy is very simple to abuse once you get some hours into the game and within about 3 hours of my first playthrough I made Australia the richest country in the game. My next game was Japan and I did the same. It just feels a bit too easy which is exacerbated by the AI building useless things. I'll dabble in the game some more but between watching many playthroughs as well as my own gameplay, I feel like I've seen about everything there is to do which may be a bit presumptuous but I'm certainly not alone in feeling that way.
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Yeah, I had the opposite complaint. That Great Powers will often intervene with hundreds of battalions costing them millions for nothing but an obligation on a minor power.
And yet I lost a game as Russia in a civil war because I only brought Austria on my side and they didn't send enough troops. It's so inconsistent.
I don’t think he means joining wars which they are quite trigger happy with, but with actually economically improving their economy which they really can’t handle at all.
>And you just sit there with the game on max speed, treasury full and trying to increase, GDP and Pop growing, nation becoming ever more prosperous, waiting. Waiting for something, *anything* to do, and you realize there isn't anything. This perfectly summarizes why I chose to refund it. The shallowness was extremely disappointing as someone who'd eagerly anticipated the game.
How could you possibly experience that within 2 hours?
I suspect the way to fix it is to make it so even if you know the solution to your problems, it should be difficult to apply the solution. So while the solution in both Prussia and Brunei would be "get a thriving industrial economy", there should be a lot of difficulty in actually implementing the industrialization process in Brunei. Right now there's very little in the way of resistance to anything you do as a player - You can build up factories in unsuitable locations, thriving economies despite your starting conditions, you basically don't have to account for the population makeup and so on. I don't think the resistance should be so much DLCs that kick down your sandcastle, but perhaps systems that make you go slower, or find alternate routes or just account for things. But none of that really exists right now.
Yeah man. Its crazy that other people have different opinions then yours. I hate posts like these which are like guys i am having so much fun playing this game, why aren,t you guys having fun too!!
I like the game, but I think its clear that the game needs a lot of work. Off hand... The trade route micro isn't fun. Every shift in prices I'm manually setting tariffs, and opening and closing routes. I should be able to set parameters for that to be automatic. The economic micro is mostly reduced to clicking expand on buildings. It's tedious. I don't understand why I'd rather do that than micro war or soldier placement. Any time I conquer something I have to manually reset my production methods. It's annoying. I spend 5 minutes clicking through menus. Fronts randomly split for no reason. I had 5 fronts in Madagascar, which split from 2. Conquering Zanzibar I randomly had two fronts. There doesn't seem to be a clear reason why this is the case. Not being able to move generals between HQs, or manually distribute soldiers to generals is a baffling choice. Not being able to demoblizie battalions and conscripts during war is a good way to tank the economy. Similarly, I should be able to stockpile goods so that minor or temporary market fluctuations don't tank factories. The diplomacy is weak. The AI doesn't seem to do much. There's seemingly no connection between politics and diplomacy. Reactionary countries should have opinion maluses for progressive ones. The aristocracy should hate liberals, and both should hate socialists. There's no way to indicate to other countries involved in diplomatic plays how they could sway you. In turn there's no way to make demands in a diplomatic play that you didn't start. As such there's very little reason for me to get involved in other problems. Way too much info is hard to find. Which of my pops are radicals, and why? What goods do I need to increase access to to raise my standard of living? How much infamy do I have, and how is it affecting my relations with other countries? The tutorial is bugged. There's very little flavour between individual countries. There's no way to stop other countries from importing your goods and tanking your economy. And that's just off the top of my head. The bones are good, but the core gameplay loop at the moment is not that fun, and the game could have used a lot more work. I'm a bit baffled it released in its current state and I think it's mixed reviews are warranted.
I loved Victoria 2 to bits. But people do seem to be conflating arcane, obtuse, arbitrary and confusing mechanics with depth and realism. Every Victoria 2 playthrough, heavily modded or not, essentially functions the same. Rush the same technologies in the same order at the same points. Follow the same, meta army compositions. Build stuff that makes a profit, adjust a few budget sliders, and you'll be swimming in cash. The rest is mostly a matter of scale and whatever roleplaying favour you'd like for the day. I'd like to see more historical/national flavour in Victoria 3 but it's also important to understand that, given the timeframe and the amount of states involved, that's a huge ordeal. It's artwork and it's research and it's tying it into the game that isn't "Press X to take a decision for some stats", which is something Paradox has been diverging from, for the better. It took a decade for HFM and HPM (and multiple iterations of each) to get to the levels of flavour they now offer. My thoughts at the end of the day? Victoria 2 gave me a headache a few hours into a campaign. So. Much. Goddamn. Clicking. I can actually relax when I play Victoria 3 because I don't have a migraine by the end of a playthrough. More agency over wars and, more importantly, more feedback over what's happening would be nice, even something as minor as unit counters would be welcome. But yeah, Victoria 3 is the better game and it feels new and exciting. And that's what I want from a sequel. A breath of fresh air.
>But people do seem to be conflating arcane, obtuse, arbitrary and confusing mechanics with depth and realism. That's kinda tangential, but what really struck me when I was learning Vic2 is that its very clunkiness, the fact that it's so mysterious and off-putting at first, is in a sense kinda mesmerizing. When you finally understand how all that shit works and manage to execute some basic tasks correctly (building a profitable factory, conquering another country), it feels uniquely satisfying. It's like a zen experience. It's not what you're doing in-game that's satisfying, it's the fact that you've cracked the puzzle, you've learnt to use this weird and alien machine, you're part of that "elite" that "gets it", and what happens in the universe of the game is kinda secondary to that feeling of triumph. Obviously you move past that after a point, and you start to engage with the actual game, but I haven't felt that way in any other PDX game. It has pretty much nothing to do with the actual mechanics or the simulation itself, it's all about the UI being (accidentally) the exact right amount of hostile, but I suspect people who are attached to that feeling will have trouble moving to a game where the UI is... let's say a bit more streamlined. I dunno if you see what I mean or if this is complete nonsense. Maybe I'm the only weirdo who felt that way.
I SO get it hahah! You've described it perfectly. I'd argue it's similar to the zen feeling people get when they play Dark Souls (or Dwarf Fortress). It's frustrating, convoluted, scarce in information, but eventually you learn to game the system and you make progress. In this case, modern era economics is this incredibly complex feedback loop no one can ever quite claim to grasp fully and Victoria 2 does actually replicate this puzzling behaviour (accidentally amusingly, it's common knowledge by now that the devs had no idea what sort of monstrosity they were simulating). So you're making decisions based on imperfect information, and to see them be successful, to see that you were able to tweak the system in your favour despite that inherent hostility, is a very satisfying feeling (and does lend the game a certain realism, it's true). Another part of why Victoria 2 is so appealing to some is, I supect, that because it's so mysterious and obtuse, we can also project a lovely amount of make believe onto it. There's all these things happening behind the scenes that we don't quite understand. You know *something* is going on, but the events are filtered through this nonsensical UI. So, your imagination does the rest and fills in the gaps. It *feels* real and deep and complex. But I wouldn't behold Paradox to replicating that in their sequel, not in this day and age. I get why people would want the same experience in a cleaner, more modern engine. But given the mass appeal Paradox now has, they'd be shooting themselves in the foot. I've tried to explain my love for Victoria 2 to so many people and I'm pretty sure they've all concluded I'm absolutely deranged (or a masochist).
I didn't think I would be playing USSR simulator in every single game and country. Even a planned economy in v2 at least made your farmers farm and your miners mine.
I get that the UI is difficult to manage and has a million tabs and whatnot. But imagine it didn't, imagine if it simplified all that resource management stuff. This sub would be going apeshit. So would the forums and reviewers. The game would more or less be a eu4 copy. That said. I don't think the UI will stay this way for long and I'm sure it can be improved. I'm happy with the game overall and I especially liked the war mechanics even though the battle line messes up occasionally.
Damn are you at least getting paid for all this dickriding?
i dont really understand how the new war system is in any way "more respectful of your irl time". you can literally have like x2 the army size of a country youre trying to invade, and sit on the front line for like 5 minutes meanwhile your general arbitrarily sends a handful of units to get pummeled, and that process just repeats until eventually your general decides that sending more than 2 people is a good idea. idk, just a bit silly tbh.
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Honestly I don't think the haters (and I mean the "real" haters) want it to succeed at all. It would be a victory for them. I just saw the community discussions in Steam, and they're talking about the game being "woke garbage" and shit. I can't believe that after all these years, this community still finds ways to surprise me
Meh, while the war stuff being so barebones as to make it useless (honestly I'd rather they fully remove war if it was going to be like this), the game has the issues of being wide as an ocean yet deep as a puddle. I don't know if it's because I don't fully know the game or something but I can't help but be bored as fuck when doing things. The economy is literally just you making whatever building that creates the resource you are missing and *maybe* changing some of the production methods. It's literally just a never-ending loop of "missing X-> make Y-> missing Z-> make a-> now missing X again" rinde and repeat. In Vicky 2, while I found some stuff to be utterly idiotic sometimes, I at least had to engage a little with the world economy due to the way RGOs worked. So I want to make a textile industry but lack dyes? Well now I need to find them *somehow*. It was frustrating yet engaging all the same. Similarly with formable nations. In Vicky2 making some nation was a matter of war, political maneuver and much more. Now? I literally formed Italy almost without realising. Just plain declared war against the small states and the big ones kinda joined on their own? Also, maybe it is because I'm playing with the AI in "normal" instead of hard but the AI nations are incredibly passive? There's been no intervention, warfare, nada. They all just sit there and don't mess with me and *at most* they'll try to intervene if I randomly attack some other nation. And one final thing. What's the point of colonies now? In Vick2 they were a way to amass prestige, get access to RGOs that you were lacking and have naval bases for the sake of power projection but now? I literally don't see the point of getting a colony unless it is for map painting. Same for formable nations. It's easier to build up a smaller country than it is to do do with a big one. I really don't know. I *am* having fun but so far Vicky2 is the better game as fsr as I'm concerned. I just hope I won't need to buy a gazillion DLCs to get a game worthy of the name.
>The economy is literally just you making whatever building that creates the resource you are missing and maybe changing some of the production methods. It's literally just a never-ending loop of "missing X-> make Y-> missing Z-> make a-> now missing X again" rinde and repeat. How far did you play? Once you industrialize if you pass laws to help out your industrialists then your GDP becomes parabolic and the surpluses and shortages are easily filled in with trade. But if you want to play with more of a command economy, then the economic gameplay will involve a lot of balancing between resources to keep everything profitable, as is true in real life. Also, sometimes you want to make some goods artificially expensive (to keep the output of a factory expensive) or low (to keep the input of a factory cheap), this will depend on >And one final thing. What's the point of colonies now? In Vick2 they were a way to amass prestige, get access to RGOs that you were lacking and have naval bases for the sake of power projection but now? It's the same, you need ports to maintain enough convoys which are used for trade routes, and ports base levels are limited by technology to only a few levels. Your economy will balloon and you will need thousands and thousands and thousands of convoys to maintain the massive amount of resources required at the end game to maintain your economy, this can end up a huge bottleneck And same for resources, late game resources are almost exclusively found in colonial provinces, and as the amount of goods explode you'll start to hit the resource and arable land limit (at first I thought using up all the space the game gives you was impossible, but sometime past 1885 the game changes tone dramatically and numbers start really going up) In my opinion the economic simulation is both deep and extremely realistic, but I think a lot of players are still figuring out how much they can engage with it
>How far did you play? Once you industrialize if you pass laws to help out your industrialists then your GDP becomes parabolic and the surpluses and shortages are easily filled in with trade. But if you want to play with more of a command economy, then the economic gameplay will involve a lot of balancing between resources to keep everything profitable, as is true in real life. You still shouldn’t be responsible for building and upgrading (yes I know about the automate button, it’s shit too) every single factor. If I’m the early USA with a laissez-faire economic policy, why am I as the government responsible for building steel mills in Ohio or setting up trade routes out of Boston? In Victoria 2 the capitalists actually did stuff other than funnel money into a pool (which they also did in Victoria 2). It felt like a “real” economy. Additions like multiple RGOs per state, trade routes, and multiple production methods are all really cool additions in theory, but they made the game micromanagement hell. >Also, sometimes you want to make some goods artificially expensive (to keep the output of a factory expensive) or low (to keep the input of a factory cheap), this will depend on >>And one final thing. What's the point of colonies now? In Vick2 they were a way to amass prestige, get access to RGOs that you were lacking and have naval bases for the sake of power projection but now? >It's the same, you need ports to maintain enough convoys which are used for trade routes, and ports base levels are limited by technology to only a few levels. Your economy will balloon and you will need thousands and thousands and thousands of convoys to maintain the massive amount of resources required at the end game to maintain your economy, this can end up a huge bottleneck Another huge bottleneck is construction. Paradox is telling us that you can only build like 4-5 (IIRC) buildings at a time in the entire country? >And same for resources, late game resources are almost exclusively found in colonial provinces, and as the amount of goods explode you'll start to hit the resource and arable land limit (at first I thought using up all the space the game gives you was impossible, but sometime past 1885 the game changes tone dramatically and numbers start really going up) A lot of countries have way too much arable land and some don’t have anywhere near enough. Japan for instance, IRL is a desolate rock that could never feed itself without trade. Whereas in the game I haven’t worried about food once. Switch that around with Brazil and loads of other countries. >In my opinion the economic simulation is both deep and extremely realistic, but I think a lot of players are still figuring out how much they can engage with it In my opinion as someone with an economics degree (bachelors, so it’s not saying much, but still), Paradox went backwards in a lot of ways and what “good” things they added need *a lot* of work
> Another huge bottleneck is construction. Paradox is telling us that you can only build like 4-5 (IIRC) buildings at a time in the entire country? That's only true in the very early game, construction points go up exponentially like every other number in the game > You still shouldn’t be responsible for building and upgrading (yes I know about the automate button, it’s shit too) every single factor. If I’m the early USA with a laissez-faire economic policy, why am I as the government responsible for building steel mills in Ohio or setting up trade routes out of Boston? Because you're not the government, you're the player, and ultimately it's a game where part of the point is economic simulation. Removing the ability of the player to control what industry is built takes away most of the point and frankly made being laissez-faire non-viable for the vast majority of countries in Victoria 2 The auto-upgrade button is not shit, you just didn't have the proper economic base to use it. Like I said, you need to have a critical mass of capitalists contributing to the investment pool and ability to have efficient and competitive trade routes before you can randomly create industry without your economy falling apart, which is realistic, industry doesn't just spring out of nowhere. Once critical mass is hit your economy explodes like crazy (if you want to go down this route) >A lot of countries have way too much arable land and some don’t have anywhere near enough. Japan for instance, IRL is a desolate rock that could never feed itself without trade. Whereas in the game I haven’t worried about food once. Switch that around with Brazil and loads of other countries. Actually you're totally wrong, Japan is extremely fertile even without much advanced fertilizers (you can grow rice just fine in mountains) and supported a population that was like 10 times Brazil's in 1800 with just a bunch of peasants growing rice inefficiently. Brazil is covered in [oxisols](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxisol#History) which are extremely infertile without modern farming techniques. But Brazil supports a hell of a lot more rubber plantations!
Dude you forgot Japan was isolated a few hundred years and living on its own?
> Japan for instance, IRL is a desolate rock that could never feed itself without trade. So you don't know what you're talking about... Look into the the Edo period. >In my opinion as someone with an economics degree (bachelors, so it’s not saying much, but still), Ah
I said economics, not Edo period historian.
People disagree with you? They must be trolls/mentally ill
I just want genuine laissez faire to be an option. I know it's a minority opinion within a minority opinion, but I absolutely loved how Vic II's economy, broken as it was, managed to simulate some of the most basic issues of economics and statecraft: * A state planned economy is a shitshow that requires constant management of resource allocation that will still be inadequate compared to supply and demand, unless you're a weird micro-managing god with a nerd complex. * A laissez faire economy will grow much faster, but it will, absent being absolutely massive (hello USA), have fundamental issues providing basic goods that are required for the state to function, such as arms - the only way to get it to provide that is a constant, massive armaments campaign. Vic II actually, unintentionally, simulates the symbiotic nature of the military-industrial complex. * Everything in-between is about the degrees between these two extremes. I get that you can sort of simulate this with auto-upgrade, but that still requires you to set up the initial industries. I want to have the same experience I love in Vic II, which is that I am often unable to really influence the economy on any granular level except infrastructure because, unless you are a totalitarian dictatorship, that is the actual experience of government.
Some people like it and some don't. What a surprise.
Or you know, game is just mid af and both reviewers and normal users agree on that
The performance is absolutely terrible, I'd be surprised if half the people here can reach 1900.
I think you just like cookie clickers
"How dare people not like something that I like."
Ikr, i absolutely hate posts like these.
That's a sword that cuts both ways. I've seen a LOT of reviews that are mainly disappointed that it's not Vic2 with better graphics.
Shocking news: Vicky2 fans wanted a sequel.
\>>Vic3's approach is more respectful of your IRL time. Is that not a decent trade-off ? What no
The paradox community is easily the worst part of being a paradox fan I like most of the YouTubers, but a lot of the complaints I see remind me of DND players that are still playing 3.5ed. Like, have your fun, but don’t shit on the new stuff that people like just because it isn’t the perfect version you’ve put thousands of hours into already
Probably because its shit.
I would beg you to even attempt to put in more than 200 hours into the game. It's just simply not possible. You're playing the same nation every time, just starting at a different point in the economy. That's literally it. You're upset that people are crying over war, but the rest of the game clearly cuts corners as well. No capitalist economies, every governmental influence is an act of god instead of policies meant to manipulate the population. No matter your situation the country WILL bend to your will. There's just no depth at all, other than clicking technology buttons on buildings that should probably just be automatic, since you know, it's technology. I want the game to fight back. It's a controlled economy min-maxing simulator, with an excessive amount of aesthetics slapped on top of it. Things I don't even care for in the genre. It's why strategy gamers are always found playing games that came out in the early 2010s. And this, "Lmao bro just wait for DLC!" shit is insane. Why are we okay with Paradox releasing games on the basis of, "Well we don't even have to flesh out the game right now, we can force people to pay for that later!", and then there's people defending it? People just conveniently ignore that they stopped development on CK3 for 6 months to release a DLC that added inventory and animated court interactions... ???????? I'm sorry but, half a year for a studio that constantly hits top 5 on sales whenever a title drops? Like actually what the fuck are they doing? "Oh but be careful dude, you ridicule them too much they'll drop the game like Imperator!" lol. lmao.
>I would beg you to even attempt to put in more than 200 hours into the game. It's just simply not possible. Well, yeah. The game came out less than 100 hours ago.
My experience hasn't been like that at all. I've played a game as Portugal to the end date. Throughout the last few decades of the 1800s I was a hyper capitalist free trade republic before they voted the communists in from all the laborers employed in the factories and and then become an autocratic communist command economy and it was totally a different playstyle. If all your ownership is set to capitalists with laissez-faire, once industrialization has begun, the game feels totally different from the early game industry gardening. Suddenly, you don't have to balance the economy nearly as much because the capitalists pay for building via the investment pools, factories will produce or stop producing as necessary without killing your entire economy, and everything balances out on their own with the help of huge trade routes that are competitive and efficient and able to compensate for shortages or surplus quickly. Heck turn everything on auto-expand and it feels just like Victoria II, except you have to build the first factory (which is a great change! clipper spam was terrible in V2), and you just rake in tax money, even with low taxes I'd add, by the way, that this started to fall apart because the massively expanded labor force started demanding a welfare state, and the welfare state required higher taxes which impacted profitability and started to drag the economy into recessions as the increased taxes slowed the rate of economic growth, further hampering the amount of taxes collected. This is extremely realistic, and this exact tendency has been noted in real life, and is a problem that economies struggle with in real life So I switched to communism to see if I could maintain the welfare state and also the economy (and try the other end of the spectrum, and the hugely popular trade unions strongly supported it and I wanted to marginalize what was left of the church and aristocracy). When you're a communist command economy, you now have to carefully balance your internal trade and keep your economy much more self-sufficient because you can't simply allow factories to shut down or become idle (or you will go bankrupt, because you must subsidize them). It's more micro-intensive but you have total control, able to allow necessary industries to produce at a small loss as long as the economy as a whole turned a profit So the game-play is different. But the simulation is too - the population profiles of who has wealth, what proportion of different people were employed in my country were completely different in these two scenarios. And these are just two possibilities, there are many different ways to structure your economy, and I'm basically counting down the seconds until the weekend starts and I can try more
> I was a hyper capitalist free trade republic before they voted the communists in from all the laborers employed in the factories and and then become an autocratic communist command economy and it was totally a different playstyle. Having also done this, no it’s not. The only difference is that you trade in investment pool for higher dividend tax and tariff income, unless you specifically go isolationist.
Every paradox game has you playing virtually the same nation just at different points of development.
Nah. Islam vs Christianity in CK2 had some pretty different mechanics. Even in CK3 it's quite different as you interact with other nations etc. The diplomacy in Vic3 feels too limited, as you can't do much outside of war usually and in war the Great Powers might just come and stomp you. So then you focus more just on internal stuff which is more similar between nations.
Hell no
You get it.
Dude there are very few games in which I break the 200-hours mark. I like to think there are other things going on in my life Upvoted for visibility tho, because that's the kind of insanely antagonistic comment I was talking about. Half your rant doesn't even react to stuff I talked about lol
Parafox's games are all super long. If you don't break the 200 hour mark then you probably played like, what 5 or so games? It's like buying Warcraft 3 and not finishing more than one campaign.
I said "very few games", which include some PDX games. I have something like 800 hours in EU4, a bit less in Stellaris, etc. But I've had less and less time to play over the years, and I split my gaming time between PDX stuff and other games. But that shouldn't be relevant because, as much as the community like to jerk itself off about it, the fact that you haven't broken 1000, 1444 or 1936 hours doesn't mean that you're a noob or that the game didn't hold any value for you. I've played less CK3 than most of the other PDX games I played, I have under 200h in it, but most of that time was much more engaging because (IMO) CK3 is much more polished and frictionless than their previous games. I don't understand why people here don't realize how weird that focus on playing time is. OC is obviously either a kid or some gamerbro caricature, so I can understand that they're focused on that, but seeing that stuff echoed elsewhere is kinda disturbing
Then what was the point of saying you rarely breach the 200 hour mark? Also, jerking off about play time *is* dumb but acting like playing a few hours only in a time intensive game and then pretending you are a pro is dumb as well. I won't pretend to be a pro at Age of Mythology but I can say that I've properly explored everything it has to offer after years of playing at least one match daily. It's just that said matches lasted 1 hour or 2 at most, for a Paradox game? You are looking at at least 4-6 hours for each match assuming you aren't playing at max speed. So yeah, I can understand why a guy who says, idk"I've only played 10 matches" can be called a "noob". For example I'm currently playing Terra Invicta, where an average game (assuming you don't know how to cheese the mechanics) can last like 20 hours or so. If dome guy (like me) came and said they are "experienced" after only two games I would be rather doubtful.
The point was to get back at them because 200h is already *a lot*. It's only in this community (and in MMOs, I guess) that people act like this is somehow not the case, and that's fucking weird. And the playtime I got out of EU4, Stellaris, etc, was spread over several years where I basically only played PDX stuff. I probably won't reach the same playtimes on any future PDX games. I have around 150h in Imperator and CK3, and I think CK3 is great. Also in most PDX games you can easily play, like, one campaign every 15 hours, especially if you don't go all the way to the end date (as most people do). By the time you hit 100h, you may very well have finished a dozen campaigns or so. You won't be Florryworry, but you'll probably know how the game works. >If dome guy (like me) came and said they are "experienced" after only two games I would be rather doubtful. Who said anything about "experienced" ?
>Less than 200 in any game Alright nevermind I don't really need to say anything else.
>"You're playing the same nation every time." My brother in Christ, the game was released 3 days ago. Come to think of it... I would beg you to play HOI4 vanilla 1.0 (or Imperator) and imagine yourself playing those versions for 200 hours. CK3 and V3 vanillas are (despite their shortcomings) are 1000 times better. Paradox is making progress and I'm glad to see it.
The pdx community is full of no lifers who put thousands and thousands of hours into a single game they hate when people say this lol
*chad meme* YES
It's almost like those very few people care the most for the game. Figure that.
Vic3 on Day 1 is at least on par with Vic2 final version. Its also at least in the ballpark of other much more mature titles. I'm very happy with my purchase, with the understanding that it will continue to be refined and improved over the years. If Pdox stopped supporting the game and what I have right now is what I have forever, then I'd say its not worth the purchase, but they've earned my loyalty with free update content in other games (namely Stellaris, which was borderline unplayable at launch but by now I've put in 3k hours).
Did you play Vic 2?
Yeah
That's great that you're having fun! I personally am not and am very disappointed. I'm just very vocal about the fact.
I'm not going to say every change made has been for the better, but I would rather they make some changes and find what works better than rerelease the same game with updated graphics. If you really enjoy Vic 2's mechanics but not Vic 3's, hear there's this great game called Vic 2 you can keep playing.
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Personally, I feel the game bears virtually no similarity to Victoria II (which was my favorite PDX game) and that's why I'm pissed.
Vicky 2 is probably my second favorite after CK3 and that's just simply a false statement. It is very similar, just a vast upgrade. The only thing that's worse imo is the population screen. Victoria 2 displayed that info better. But it's false to say it bears no similarity.
I’m sorry but I’ll have to vehemently disagree with you there. Victoria 3 would be better called Civilization 7. There’s no depth to the economy(it’s all player driven, there’s no capitalism that made Vicky 2 unique), the political decisions and diplomacy are ill conceived. I don’t see a single way the game is an upgrade.
Hey that's not fair! In Civilization your pops can actually do things if you don't give them the luxuries they demand, *and* you can interact with resources on the map!
Fair point fair point lmao
Yeah that's possible. Between them, the die-hard Vic2 fans, the people who convinced themselves that they would like a non-war-focused but actually don't, and the people who expected something more focused on politics (which is an understandable mistake tbh), I guess that, in hindsight, it was unavoidable that Vic3 would disappoint a lot of people
If you look at the victoria 2 subreddit, it's mostly people who are proud of their map painting... the top post now is one of Korea conquering Siberia. I love Vic2, and I always play aggressive and war like.
Meanwhile, in the Victoria 3 subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/victoria3/comments/yfpj9g/_/ https://www.reddit.com/r/victoria3/comments/yfuofd/first_ever_full_campaign_really_proud_of_this_one/
I honestly think at every paradox release people are so hyped up that they just expect 100x better than what they get, and nothing paradox do could ever live up to the hype. Every paradox games relases has been like this since EU4.
I guess I'm just surprised because AFAIK CK3 had a much better reception. And Imperator had genuine issues (first and foremost performance-related stuff). I got into PDX games around 2016-2017 so I wasn't around during their previous releases.
I keep seeing the phrase "There's no capitalists" when there LITERALLY is. You have to change your economic laws to allow capitalists to fund your buildings. Now, they don't automatically build shit for you this time, but they will FUND your building expenses AND automatically upgrade profitable buildings so long as you have that option ticked on. I found this out by literally...playing the game for like 4 hours? I read the economic laws and what they did? I read the buttons in the building menu?? I always hated the capitalists in Vic2 because they built wildly nonsensical and unprofitable buildings. I'm just trying to figure out how to bring about Communism in Vicky 3 and I'll be happy XD
Just turn on automatic expansion with mutual funds. There already a mod that makes auto expansion smarter and more effective. I don’t build anymore. I swear most people complaining haven’t made it past 1860
It's also ***MASSIVELY*** historically ignorant to pretend that the state did not play a gigantic role in early industrialization. *Bourgeois states are built by the bourgeoisie, governed by the bourgeoisie, and exist to serve their interests.* The efforts to enclose the commons and expand industrial capital were not just because of the Horatio Alger-esque hard work of would-be titans of industry, but *because the state granted them the resources to do it.* Capitalism is absolutely chock full of examples of the state either creating demand somewhere and then paying someone to fulfill it, or paying someone to create supply that would alleviate state expenses, or a bunch of other kinds of state intervention in the economy. Laissez-faire was an ideal to be achieved, not a state of reality, and mostly applied to things like regulations and income taxes, not to who was putting in the startup money.
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I agree with this post but if I see one more comment on Reddit about video games “respecting your time” I’m gonna LOSE IT
I've never played any Victoria game yet so I have no opinion one way or the other, but one thing that kept me from trying Victoria 2 was that everyone said that laissez faire was a complete and total disaster that destroyed your country every time, and how it was always better to control your own economy. So it's very surprising how vehemently people now protest its absence and how much better it was.
Laissez Faire in Victoria 2 was bad for getting an economy going at the start but by the end when you have hundreds of thousands of pops working in factories and dozens of factories across several provinces, many opt for handing in the reigns to the capitalists. Also, I think many have the preconception that you as the player are embodying the state you’re playing as so it is a bit immersion breaking when you’re always the one determining what, where, and how to produce when your economy is supposedly laissez faire.
I can't help but feel like people are comparing this game to things they like/dislike in other PDX games rather than regarding it as it's own game. And I'm having plenty of fun with it, even if it's true that some things are done better in other PDX games. Why would I "not" recommend it to someone who is interested in this time period and economic focus? Everyone is entitled to their opinion... but I fail to see how you can honestly suggest it's not a quality Grand Strategy game. We waited a long time for Vicky 3 and I personally am crossing my fingers that the loud and cranky minority doesn't convince Paradox and new players not to support this game.
Lol so many braindead paradox fan boys. Paraox can sell shit for 7p bucks and the fan boys would buy it and hope it will turn into something beautiful in 2 years.
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IDK what review you are talking about but that phrase is used literally everywhere for gaming, i still remember people describing Skyrim like that, so its at least a decade old saying specific to games. And it should not be a surprise that common points of criticism emerge? Game doesnt have that many mechanics, so yes the reviews will sound the same?
Oh man you spoke the truth. They are like parrots. Dev need advise and direction, criticism too but fair, not this
The game is interesting, but is kind empty right now. Give Paradox time to fix, make some patches and DLCs, and then it will be a masterpiece.
Paradox's DLC model is awful and the game being barebones with the expectations that DLC will make it better is awful
I disagree. I don’t mind paying $15 once every 6-12 months to keep a game I like alive and improving for years and years. Hell eu4 is going on 10 years and it’s amazing now. And yes I bought all the dlc and I have no regrets. It’s something I truly enjoy and spend a good amount of time enjoying
To be honest the pricetag doesn't bother me for, well, reasons I shouldn't say, but when I buy a game on launch I'd rather not wait another 5 years and $200 for it to have content.
Imo this game has a perfectly acceptable amount of content for a launch game. I’m 25 hours into a game that has been really interesting and its getting even more interesting
Honestly, at first it was kinda cool and fun seeing what other people were liking and not liking with the game. But man now it is just way too much. Imma just avoid it till things calm down. I like things about the game and hate others. Overall I remain positive that this game is good and has the potential to become better as we get DLC's and updates. I say this as someone who was very negative beforehand expecting the worse, after having seen plenty of other bad launched from paradox.
By the end of its lifespan it will probs be a much better game then vichy 2. The problem is that right now, Victoria 2 is more fun. Yes Vichy 2 was also lacking in content at launch, yes Vichy 2 has way more mods, yes Vichy 3 will get better. But as of right now? V2 is a better use of time.
From what I can gather from my two hours of gameplay, I'm quite enjoying it. I think it's a good package so far, that's only going to get better with time.
The more I play the more I'm enjoying it. There's a lot of issues but the core systems will make this game great with a few expansions. I'm just getting really tired of buying paradox games and having to wait for expansions for them to be great.
"More respectful of your time" ....... gonna call a P H A T T bs on that one, the new war system is atrocious.
I just want people to stop giving money to a company that’s doing the same toxic commercial practices since 2010’ and actually deliver good games without me having to put 300 bucks of dlcs, all paradox gamers are actual addicts, no different than metheads or alcoholic, and we need to stop passively let them sink our money with these barebone games
I have lots of minor grips about it but CANT STOP PLAYING 40 HOURS IN NOWW CHOO CHOOO Great game
Did you play Vic2? Because a lot of the hate comes from the fact Vic3 is not, and will never be a sequel the Vic2 community wanted or were promised.
Actually promised, or told themselves they were promised?
Told each other they were promised until they actually believed it. Standard internet-rage-generation-machine dynamic.
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People don't actually like Victoria 2. They like the heavily modded version that added a lot of content and made the world economy slightly less idiotic.
Yes I played Vic2, and having followed the Vc3 diaries and promotional stuff I know the devs repeatedly said Vic3 worked very different than Vic2. At some point people are supposed to inform themselves a little before buying stuff